Designing Resilience of the Built Environment to Extreme Weather Events

Built environment comprises of a multitude of complex networks of buildings and processes in and between buildings. The paper looks at resilience design on three different levels: the building, the site, and the region. The building resilience design is studied using multi-objective optimization of a recently completed Passivhaus retrofit, under four different climate years: current, 2030, 2050, and 2080. The site resilience design is studied on the basis of a balance between incoming solar radiation and evaporative cooling from transpiration of plants to mitigate heat island effect. The regional resilience design is studied using a network model, taking into account connectivity, information capacity, and the ability to reconfigure. A common denominator found between these three aspects is a degree of system redundancy. Thus, a provision for adaptable building thermal insulation, a provision for adaptable green areas, and a provision for adaptable connectivity are the ingredients for resilient designs on these three respective levels. The findings increase our understanding of practical issues and implications for the resilience design of the built environment under extreme weather events. A combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches discussed in the paper provides practical guidance for designers and policy makers.