**4. Resilient buildings**

#### **4.1. Resilience**

The term resilience has been around for centuries and has been used in engineering, ecology and psychology before coming to civil protection and disaster risk reduction.

Several definitions of the concept of resilience can be found in the literature, for example, in publications from Timmerman [26] and Holling [27]. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction came with the following definition in 2009:

*"The ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management." [28].*

Today, increased risk to hazards is manifested in cities. Climate change (flooding), earthquakes and terrorism, for example, pose new challenges to cities. Cities should be resilient to prevent social breakdown, physical collapse or economic deprivation. The Rockefeller Foundation report for the City Resilience Framework [29] describes city resilience as 'the capacity of cities to function, so that the people living and working in cities – particularly the poor and vulnerable – survive and thrive no matter what stresses or shocks they encounter'. It is stated that risk assessments and measures to reduce specific foreseeable risks will continue to play an important role in urban planning. Buildings also have an important role to play in this area. In land-scarce urban areas, more and more people are working and making their homes in high-rise buildings, which impose a challenge on safety issues if not well taken care of. If an earthquake or a fire strikes in a dense city, the consequences can be very serious. Energy efficiency and sustainability should—and can—go hand in hand with more resilient buildings.

Fire can cause disturbance to a city's ability to deliver its service to the community. Especially in densely populated urban areas, the built environment is a crucial part of the city's infrastructure. In January 2018, a fire in a hospital in South Korea killed 37 people and injured over 100. All patients had to be evacuated and the hospital was immediately closed. This meant that this hospital was no longer able to serve the community, and the remaining patients had to be relocated somewhere else. To improve resilience, it is recommended to include property protection of critical infrastructure, in addition to the current requirements for life safety in

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http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.81803

Also, efforts to improve the sustainability of buildings often focus on increasing energy efficiency and reducing the embodied carbon. However, a fire could reduce the overall sustainability of a building through the release of pollutants and the subsequent rebuild. Furthermore, fires have a range of less immediate and obvious adverse consequences on the natural environment. These include air contamination (which is likely to also include land and water contamination), contamination from water runoff containing toxic products and

As stated earlier, there is a disconnection between sustainable building approaches and building regulations. When designing a sustainable and energy-efficient building, architects usually focus on elements such as using solar energy and promoting air circulation. In parallel, fire safety requires the respect of building codes and other specific national requirements focusing on other elements such as safe escape routes and optimal operating conditions for

Moreover, sustainable building assessments are based on a life-cycle description of buildings, which is scenario-based—scenarios that do not plan for fire. However, statistics show the scenario of a fire occurring during the lifetime of a building is a realistic scenario altogether. In the USA, for example, an estimated 380,200 residential building fires were reported to fire

Therefore, methods that include quantitative risk assessment (QRA) for predicting fire spread to adjacent structures; life-cycle assessment (LCA) for estimating the environmental impact, the fire response and replacement of damaged materials; and cost–benefit analysis (CBA) for estimating the economic impact of the fire have been proposed to analyse optimal designs and environmental consequences [36]. These methods could be one solution to include fire

In summary, fire safety, sustainability and energy efficiency should be assessed together. A risk assessment should be performed both when building new and when renovating as fire does not only have an impact on the structure of a building but also has societal, environmen-

Managing urban areas and resources is one of the most important development challenges of the twenty-first century. Moreover, efficient and resilient buildings play a major role as part

case of fire [34].

fire fighters.

**5. Conclusions**

of the urban infrastructure.

other environmental releases from burned materials.

departments each year between 2013 and 2015 [35].

resilience in sustainable building assessment.

tal and economic impacts that we should try to mitigate.

#### **4.2. Resilient and sustainable buildings**

In resilient cities, man-made infrastructure and buildings are well-conceived, well-constructed and safeguarded against known hazards. Building codes and standards should promote long-term robustness, flexibility to adapt in the future and safe failure mechanisms in the event of a shock [28].

It has been argued that design for resilience is to design for sustainability to reduce the environmental impacts and societal consequences of post-hazard repairs [30] (as referenced in [31]). Conversely, design for sustainability is to design for resiliency to prevent that the unlikely extreme events may impact the urban communities [31]. This study shows such an integrated approach for a holistic building design, considering safety, resiliency and sustainability, based on multiple conflicting criteria. The US building assessment scheme RELI has its own system of not only assessing all types of risks related to resilient buildings but also starting from the sustainable building perspective [32].

It should be realised that building codes and standards often provide *minimum* requirements, focusing on safe escape of people. Standard EN 16309 for assessing sustainable constructions starts from this principle, by valuing 'above codes' performance as being more sustainable [33]. Accidental actions (earthquake, explosions, fire, traffic) are sustainable building aspects to assess. This shows once more the interlinkage of resilient and sustainable buildings.

The new EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) from 2018 may lead to some improvements towards holistic building design, taking both energy performance and hazards into account. It requires for renovation projects to address fire safety and risks related to intense seismic activity affecting energy efficiency renovations and the lifetime of buildings, as well as the issue of healthy indoor climate conditions (Art.2a § 7 and Art.7 § 5).

#### **4.3. Fire-resilient buildings**

The above section clarifies that fire resilience also has a connection to sustainable buildings. The fire resilience of a building is often described as the ability of a building to withstand the effects of a fire, or it is often linked to the building's fire resistance properties. However, fire resilience covers more than the technical characteristic of being fire-resistant—it considers how the environment, the community and economy adapt and recover from a fire.

Fire can cause disturbance to a city's ability to deliver its service to the community. Especially in densely populated urban areas, the built environment is a crucial part of the city's infrastructure. In January 2018, a fire in a hospital in South Korea killed 37 people and injured over 100. All patients had to be evacuated and the hospital was immediately closed. This meant that this hospital was no longer able to serve the community, and the remaining patients had to be relocated somewhere else. To improve resilience, it is recommended to include property protection of critical infrastructure, in addition to the current requirements for life safety in case of fire [34].

Also, efforts to improve the sustainability of buildings often focus on increasing energy efficiency and reducing the embodied carbon. However, a fire could reduce the overall sustainability of a building through the release of pollutants and the subsequent rebuild. Furthermore, fires have a range of less immediate and obvious adverse consequences on the natural environment. These include air contamination (which is likely to also include land and water contamination), contamination from water runoff containing toxic products and other environmental releases from burned materials.

As stated earlier, there is a disconnection between sustainable building approaches and building regulations. When designing a sustainable and energy-efficient building, architects usually focus on elements such as using solar energy and promoting air circulation. In parallel, fire safety requires the respect of building codes and other specific national requirements focusing on other elements such as safe escape routes and optimal operating conditions for fire fighters.

Moreover, sustainable building assessments are based on a life-cycle description of buildings, which is scenario-based—scenarios that do not plan for fire. However, statistics show the scenario of a fire occurring during the lifetime of a building is a realistic scenario altogether. In the USA, for example, an estimated 380,200 residential building fires were reported to fire departments each year between 2013 and 2015 [35].

Therefore, methods that include quantitative risk assessment (QRA) for predicting fire spread to adjacent structures; life-cycle assessment (LCA) for estimating the environmental impact, the fire response and replacement of damaged materials; and cost–benefit analysis (CBA) for estimating the economic impact of the fire have been proposed to analyse optimal designs and environmental consequences [36]. These methods could be one solution to include fire resilience in sustainable building assessment.

In summary, fire safety, sustainability and energy efficiency should be assessed together. A risk assessment should be performed both when building new and when renovating as fire does not only have an impact on the structure of a building but also has societal, environmental and economic impacts that we should try to mitigate.
