16. Disaster Resilient Properties: Built Environment Discourse

In developing a disaster resilience pathway, exploring the basic underlying characteristics of a given context for it to be disaster resilient is vital. Resilient properties is a terminology used to name underlying characteristics that needs to be embedded in a given context for it to be disaster resilient. Built environment plays a key role in building societal resilience, but a synthesized set of disaster resilient properties for the built environment discourse is lacking, which is the focus of this chapter. A descriptive or mapping review is conducted to identify disaster resilient properties in different contexts, and finally, a qualitative content analysis was conducted to derive a set of disaster resilient properties. Then, these properties were combined with the role of the built environment towards societal resilience. A set of six disaster resilient properties were synthesized from the study, robustness, redundancy, rapidity, participative capacity, adaptive capacity, and coping capacity. These were framed into a single framework along with the other factors associated with these properties in the literature. Also, the main roles of the built environment towards societal resilience were identified as construct, develop, stimulate, facilitate, protect, and nurture based on which a resilience pathway could be developed, embedding the disaster resilient properties.