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Millions of earthquakes occur each year throughout the world, according to The National Earthquake Information Center in the USA and its cooperators around the globe. Fortunately, most of them happen far away from highly industrialized population centers and cause little damage or disruption. But when they do occur in densely populated areas, the loss of human lives, destroyed buildings and infrastructures, and the interruption of normal life and commerce can be devastating to individuals, families, communities, businesses and governments. Companies now also need to consider, and plan for, the risk of damage to employees and property that may be caused by non‐natural causes, such as terrorist bombs. While there has been much talk about bio‐ and chemical‐terrorism, the fact remains that bombs are still the most commonly used weapon of terror worldwide. According to a US government report, entitled “Protecting Buildings from Bomb Damage,” nearly half of all international terrorist attacks are bombings. Few corporations are without risk these days just as few countries are free from random acts of terrorists’ violence. The threat of bombings is one more concern for corporations and building owners to factor into their analysis, assessment and planning for protecting their investment and building occupants. While designing a terrorist‐proof building is impossible, designing a building that will not progressively collapse when attacked, and will allow emergency workers quick access to survivors, is not. It’s a matter of designing and constructing buildings that will display predictable performance. The article discusses how building owners, corporate project teams and architects and engineers all can take measures to improve safety of occupants and contents of a building against potential blasts or explosions. There are three broad categories of countermeasures: deterrence, set back, and hardening.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated multi-risk identification procedure for World Cultural Heritage (WCH) sites exposed to seismic events, while considering characteristics of disasters from earthquakes in a multi-hazard context on one side and particular aspects of WCH (e.g. outstanding universal values and associated condition of authenticity and integrity) on the other.

An interdisciplinary review of current relevant approaches, methods, and practices is conducted through the existing literature of disaster risk management, heritage conservation, and seismology. Furthermore, a document analysis of concrete cases affected by seismic events supports concepts and the procedure.

This paper results in a methodology of identifying multi-risk of disasters induced by earthquakes. A bow-tie analysis diagram in combination with a risk identification matrix is developed for illustrating a multiple emergency scenario in identifying possible impacts of earthquakes’ primary effects, secondary hazards, and human-threats on tangible and intangible attributes of cultural properties.

The research aims to provide specialists and practitioners from multiple sectors engaged in pre-disaster risk mitigation and preparedness plan for cultural heritage with a practical risk identification tool. The proposed method, in a multiple hazard context, intends to enhance risk assessment procedure for determining more appropriate risk reduction strategies in the decision-making process.

This paper, through emphasising “earthquake disaster risk” rather than “earthquake risk”, illuminates the significance of quake-followed secondary hazards, potential human-induced hazards and human errors in the risk identification process, due to the fact that while a disaster may begin with a quake, its full scope might be triggered by a combination of the mentioned potential threats.

Focusing on Rudak, a village destroyed in the Buin-Zahra earthquake of 1962 in Qazvin, Iran, this paper aims to evaluate the reconstruction of this village in terms of sustainability. Rudak reconstruction has left long-term consequences on the physical structure of the village, as some of the people refused the constructed houses and built their own ones. Hence, after more than 50 years, this village is now consisted of two physically different neighborhoods. Examining the long-term consequences of this reconstruction through comparing housing and physical structure of the two different neighborhoods contains valuable lessons in terms of sustainability because sustainable reconstruction results unveil in long term.

Using sustainable reconstruction theory as the conceptual framework, this research investigates social, economic and environmental sustainability of Rudak housing reconstruction and that leads to comprehensive lessons. The study has a qualitative method and is based on fieldwork allowing for dynamic interviews with the community. Furthermore, data are analyzed through descriptive and comparative approaches.

The research concluded that sustainability related implications of post-disaster reconstruction policies are not restricted to the time of reconstruction or a limited interval after that. Lack of livelihood considerations, providing all people with similar houses and nontransparent decisions, resulted in unsustainable consequences such as building vulnerable extensions by people, social segregation and people unwillingness for participation. However, this experience was sustainable in terms of some other factors. For example, using local materials for building the structures of the new houses, putting the houses on the natural bedrock and building public services for people were sustainable measurements.

This paper is a rare example of research focusing on impacts of post-disaster reconstruction after more than 50 years. It contains valuable lessons for planners and architects.

Taiwan experiences frequent seismic activity. Major earthquakes in recent history have seriously damaged the school buildings. School buildings in Taiwan are intended to serve both as places of education and as temporary shelters in the aftermath of major earthquakes. Therefore, the seismic performance assessments of school buildings are critical issues that deserve investigation.

This paper develops a methodology that uses principal component analysis to generalize the seismic factors from the basic seismic parameters of school buildings, uses data mining to cluster different school building sizes and uses grey theory to analyze the relationship between seismic factors and the seismic performance of school buildings. Additionally, this paper employs the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to deduce the seismic assessment model for school buildings. Finally, it adopts support vector machine to validate the ANN’s deductive results.

An empirical study was conducted on 326 school buildings in the central area of Taichung City, Taiwan, to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Results show that thickness of wall and width of middle-row column relate significantly with school-building seismic performance.

This paper provides a model that structural engineers or architects may use to design school buildings that are adequately resistant to earthquakes as well as a reference for future academic research.

In this paper, the seismic behavior of the gusset plate moment connection (GPMC) exposed to the post-earthquake fire (PEF) is investigated.

For this purpose, for the sake of verification, first, a numerical model is built using ABAQUS software and then exposed to earthquakes and high temperatures. Afterward, the effects of a series of parameters, such as gusset plate thickness, gap width, steel grade, vertical load value and presence of the stiffeners, are evaluated on the behavior of the connection in the PEF conditions.

Based on the results obtained from the parametric study, all parameters effectively played a role against the seismic loads, although, when exposed to fire, it was found that the vertical load value and presence of the stiffener revealed a great contribution and the other parameters could not significantly affect the connection performance. Finally, to develop the modeling and further study the performance of the connection, the 4 and 8-story frames are subjected to 11 accelerograms and 3 different fire scenarios. The findings demonstrate that high temperatures impose rotations on the structure, such that the story drifts were changed compared to the post-earthquake drift values.

The obtained results can be used by engineers to design the GPMC for the combined action of earthquake and fire.

Rural building practices, especially in developing communities, are often plagued by inadequate local construction knowledge and a limited understanding of the best building practice guidelines. This has contributed significantly to compounding the effect of significant catastrophic events. The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential impact of disaster knowledge management (DKM) on improving housing resilience and makes particular reference to the 2005 earthquake in rural Pakistan.

Our research uses a comprehensive literature review that involves a qualitative approach to research aimed at understanding the 2005 earthquakes, their impacts, reconstruction challenges and DKM. Conventional published journals, articles, previous case studies and books were included. But importantly, to take in relevant local information, the review also took in published government reports, disaster mitigation policy documents, national and international NGOs publications, conference proceedings and news articles. More than 80 research papers and conference proceedings over 21 years, from 2001 to 2021, were analyzed in eight major online databases. These include Google Scholar, Science Direct, Research Gate, Scopus, Jstor, Springer, Emerald and Semantic Scholar.

The investigation identified that DKM has an important role to play in capacity building and technical knowledge transmission relating to seismic guidelines aimed at improving housing resilience. Consequently, a theoretical framework was developed, focused primarily on the post-2005 rural reconstruction mechanism and the identification of key challenges to disseminating seismic guidelines effectively in relation to rural construction practices.

This paper makes an original contribution by developing a DKM framework via the identification of key challenges that need to be addressed, in relation to rural construction practices, generally, but particularly in the Pakistan context.

The purpose is, depending on the views of principals and teachers, to determine the level of preparedness of primary schools towards prospective earthquakes from the aspect of the effectiveness of school principals; and to develop some recommendations due to the obtained results and the review of the literature.

In the research, the views of school principals and teachers were taken by a Likert type questionnaire, developed by the researcher herself. The sample of the research comprises all the elementary schools in the city centre of Elazig, a city in the Eastern Anatolian Region. As total 589 subjects responded the questionnaire. The data were computed by means of t‐test, and ANOVA according to parametric or non‐parametric situations.

The findings have revealed that the preparedness level of the schools are not so well for prospective disasters, and there are significant differences among the views of the subjects. In other words, the school principals were not so effective in achieving high level preparedness and for prospective earthquakes.

This research is limited with the views of the teachers and of principals obtained in the city centre of Elazig. Therefore, observation‐based researches may also be complementary for the reflection of the real life situation at schools.

Although Turkey is placed a very seismically active region, the attained literature review has indicated that there have not been any researches done about the preparedness of schools for the earthquakes in Turkey, yet. Therefore, this research is an original one by obtaining the views of school teachers and of principals about the preparedness of schools towards earthquakes.

In the year 2000, a team from Istanbul Technical University (ITU) developed the “Urban m³ - Respect for Life Project”, which was aimed at providing shelter for those people who were left homeless as a consequence of the earthquake in 1999, in the districts of Arizli-Kocaeli in Turkey. This earthquake had a catastrophic effect on one of the most densely populated and industrial regions of Turkey whose population accounts about 20 percent of Turkey's total population. In addition to providing shelter, the major objective of this project was to re-establish those humanistic and natural values that had been lost or obscured in respect of the traditional, Turkish life-style and culture, as a result of the rapid urban-isation which took place after the 1950s. In 2000, research was conducted to evaluate the prospective residents' preferences in respect of their future housing and its environment needs. For this purpose, 400 people, who had been living in temporary housing in the area affected by the earthquake, were the target group of an in-depth survey. The main objective of the study was to determine whether the prospective residents' perceptions and evaluations matched the project designed by the ITU's team. It was assumed within the project planning and design that people would prefer the socially, and physically rich environment offered by the project. Based on the research findings, the ideology, philosophy and concepts underlying the “Urban m³ - Respect for Life Project” could be evaluated as an altenative design approach, which provides not only environmental protection and disaster mitigation, but also a high level of socio-cultural satisfaction. Thus, the paper suggests strategies for improved post-disaster (re-)construction.

Environmental treat poses a challenge to the entire built environment. This paper aims to focus on the building asset as the key element of any urban pattern, and, therefore, a crucial condition towards success or failure in achieving resilience. Through the environmental performance assessment of the adaptive reuse project in London, this paper identifies the design principles of resilience, focusing specifically on the measures for protecting vulnerable parts of the building from damage, as well as protecting exposed parts of the building from material degradation.

Based on the overview of both scholarly articles and practitioners’ guides, the authors first offer a systematic overview of the main qualities and attributes of the resilient design. Further, to operationalise the resilient design principles, the authors use the well-established Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) on the case of adaptive reuse of the Z Hotel Holborn in London. Specifically, the authors examine if the case building applies the measures to decrease its internal vulnerability and reduce negative effects of external hazards.

The study confirms that external shocks are controlled by protecting exposed building parts from degradation and that preventing damage to vulnerable parts of the building increases resilience.

Through the analysis of both reactive and proactive perspectives of resilience, this paper elucidates the concept of resilience in the context of architectural design. Furthermore, this paper identifies the attributes of resilient architectural design and presents the measures which directly influence the durability and resilience of the building asset.