Critical review of existing built environment resilience frameworks: directions for future research

Resilience, in general, is widely considered as a system's capacity to proactively adapt to external disturbances and recover from them. However, the existing resilience framework research is still quite fragmented and the links behind various studies are not straightforwardly accessible. The paper provides a critical state-of-the-art review of both quantitative and qualitative considerations of resilience, approached from a built environment engineering perspective, with a focus on geo-environmental hazards. A research gap is identified and translated into a holistic and systemic approach to conceptualise resilience, factoring in related concepts such as vulnerability, adaptive capacity and recoverability. A generic built environment resilience framework is proposed informed by a critical and comprehensive review of the related literature. The paper concludes with insights into four key strategic areas requiring further research, namely: (a) risk based cost optimal resilient design and standards of buildings and infrastructures, (b) model based evaluation and optimisation of buildings and infrastructures, (c) integrated risk modelling, inference and forecasting, and (d) heterogeneous disaster data acquisition, integration, security and management