Special issue on the role of the built environment professional in disaster management

Citation

Brown, S. (2008), "Special issue on the role of the built environment professional in disaster management", Structural Survey, Vol. 26 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.2008.11026eaa.001

Special issue on the role of the built environment professional in disaster management

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Structural Survey, Volume 26, Issue 5

Two issues that are often discussed in real estate research are the impact of climate change and the move to an increasingly urbanised population worldwide. A less well-recognised consequence of these trends, however, is the impact that they are having on the incidence and impact of natural disasters worldwide. Looking back at the last few years, we can see this being played out in countries around the world. Flooding is becoming an increasingly frequent occurrence around the world; in the United Kingdom, USA and across South East Asia, death and destruction as a result of flooding is on the increase. We are also seeing increased deaths as a result of heatwaves in Europe. And man-made disasters often have some trigger that can be traced back to these changes, such as death and despair among migrants, forced to move by the destruction of their own habitat.

I therefore applaud the vision of the editor and publishers of Structural Survey to commission this special issue on disaster management, and I am privileged to have been invited to act as guest editor.

In our own small way, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has responded to this, prompted by the Boxing day tsunami of 2004, to set up the Presidential Commission on Disaster Management, and the papers in this special issue have a resonance with the work of Commission, in stressing the two key aspects of the surveyor or engineer’s role, that is the management role and the technical role. Of course both of these functions are of critical importance in coping with natural and man-made disasters. Jeongwook Son, Zeeshan Aziz and Feniosky Peña-Mora from the USA advocate an approach to the initial response to a disaster that emphasizes improved “situation awareness”. Their paper refers to Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attacks in demonstrating how IT systems can support the situation awareness of professionals working in highly-pressured and complex first relief environments. Roshani Palliyaguru and Dilanthi Amaratunga from the University of Salford describe the early stages of a research project that aims to improve post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction practices. Their work developed as a response to the significant loss of life in Sri Lanka during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. On the technical front there are papers by Richardson and Dave on a method to improve the fire performance of concrete and by Faham Tahmasebinia on the simulation of impact damage to reinforced concrete structures. Both papers take a laboratory based approach to their research whereas Horta and Castaño simulate mathematically a method to improve the repair of earthquake damaged structures. The latter authors’ interest in the subject has its origins in the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City. The final paper in this special issue is interesting, in that it considers both the managerial and technical roles of the professional in assessing the risk preparedness of the culturally sensitive and World Heritage site at Bam in Iran. The study follows on from the huge earthquake in this region in 2003.

There is nothing that we can do to prevent natural disasters from happening – the forces that drive them are utterly beyond our control. But we can try to understand more what can be done to reduce the suffering that follows in their wake. These papers provide a real illustration of what the built environment profession and academy can do to make a genuine and positive difference to people’s lives at a time when help is most needed. I do hope that you find them of interest.

Stephen BrownRoyal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, London, UK