Safe Enough? How Codes Protect Lives but Not Cities
Conventional wisdom holds that greater seismic resilience of the building stock is impractical; that the public is unwilling to pay for it; that the public has no proper role in setting code philosophy; and that current seismic provisions encode the proper performance goals. Recent projects cast doubt on these conventionalities. In light of performance expectations for new buildings, the code seems to guarantee that a future large but not-very-rare earthquake will damage enough buildings to displace millions of people and hundreds of thousands of businesses from a major metropolitan area. The session will explore the need for discussions that reconsider how the public prefers to measure risk, how to select a proper balance between risk and construction cost, and how to reflect that balance in code objectives.
