Functional recovery: what it means to design for community resilience

Synopsis

At the 2020 National Earthquake Conference in San Diego, USA, David Bonowitz delivered this year's EERI Distinguished Lecture. The Lecture was entitled Functional Recovery: What It Means to Design for Community Resilience. David has kindly agreed to repeat the Lecture at an online evening meeting.

The 2020 EERI Distinguished Lecture considered the emerging concept of functional recovery as a basis for earthquake-resistant design. Designing buildings and infrastructure for limited downtime – or an acceptably quick functional recovery – is not new, but it is receiving new attention through state and federal legislation, and showing new feasibility through research and technology. Most intriguing is the recognition that designing for functional recovery is a necessary tool for achieving community-wide earthquake resilience. And if progress is to be measured at the community level, functional recovery will also be a matter of public policy. The lecture looked at the roles EERI members can play in shaping this thinking into design practice with four sets of questions: definitional, technical, policy, and implementation.

About the speaker

David Bonowitz, a 25-year member of EERI, is a structural engineer practicing in San Francisco. He is a Fellow Member of SEAONC and SEAOC, and past chair of the NCSEA Existing Buildings and Resilience committees. David is an appointed member of the new FEMA-NIST working group on Functional Recovery of the Built Environment and Critical Infrastructure. He is a co-author of “Functional Recovery: A Conceptual Framework,” an EERI white paper, and lead author of “Resilience-based Design and the NEHRP Provisions,” recently published by the National Institute of Building Sciences as a resource paper for the next edition of the Provisions.

Further information

This lecture will take place online via Microsoft Teams1 – to join, click on the link below. The lecture is organised by SECED and the EERI UCL Student Chapter. The meeting will be chaired by Damian Grant (Arup). Non-members of the society are welcome to attend. Attendance at this meeting is free.

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1. Microsoft Teams is freely available on all major platforms, including Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android and iOS. To download and install the software, follow this link. SECED is not sponsored by or otherwise affiliated with Microsoft, and we do not endorse any Microsoft products.

Event Details

Event Date 27/05/2020 6:00 pm