Urban-scale framework for assessing the resilience of buildings informed by a delphi expert consultation

The integration of resilience in disaster management is an emerging field as evidenced by an abundant literature. While resilience has been widely explored in several domains, its application demands the consideration of the entire ecosystem and its lifecycle, including disaster stressors and consequences, recovery process, and ultimately the prevention phase. In this paper, a qualitative characterization of resilience for buildings on an urban scale of analysis is achieved throughout the conduct of a Delphi-based expert consultation. The aim is to elicit and validate relevant criteria to characterize the resilience of our built-environment in face of geo-environmental hazards through two phases of consultation involving 23 and 21 respondents, respectively. The initial set of criteria consisted of 40 indicators, increasing to 48 at the end of the survey. The different criteria are clustered into seven categories, ranging from environmental to socio-organizational and technical. The results from both rounds of consultation were then analysed by means of statistical analysis with MATLAB and discussed for each category. The preliminary version of the framework for buildings’ resilience assessment on an urban scale is presented with a final set of 43 validated criteria.