BRITE Synergy: Engineering More Resilient Housing through Inclusion of Women's Knowledge, Priorities and Perceptions

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Engineers have studied disaster resilience of housing as structures, but with less attention to housing as homes that embody family, hopes and dreams, and financial security. This Boosting Research Ideas for Transformative and Equitable Advances in Engineering (BRITE) Synergy project conceptualizes a novel direction in engineering resilient housing to explore how women’s and other residents’ knowledge, priorities and perceptions can shape engineering problem solving for resilient housing at the individual, community and building code level. It focuses in particular on women because of their traditional bond with and responsibilities for home in our society, and their continued underrepresentation in engineering, architecture, and construction professions. This project will explore the sources of expertise that are missed when women residents, women students and women building industry professionals in engineering resilient housing are not included. Due to the large number of homes being built, remodeled or rebuilt after disasters in this country, there is a major opportunity to address vulnerabilities in future disasters, with a potentially significant payoff in reducing community disruption. The project also attends to the need to diversify the talent ecosystem in engineering, showing how a more diverse ecosystem enhances engineering outcomes. The project’s hypothesis is that the inclusion of women’s knowledge, priorities and perceptions yields changes, for housing, in both the agenda set for engineering research and technology development, and the engineering solutions developed. This hypothesis will be tested by examining engineering problem solving in two research thrusts. The study of liquefaction remediation (Thrust 1) will develop new probabilistic engineering assessments of the risks of liquefaction-induced building damage at the home and community level, considering both repair costs (i.e., the threat to owners’ and households’ financial security) and habitability (i.e., the threat of losing the home). It will also quantify how the currently available liquefaction remediation techniques alter these risks. The project will produce a housing-driven engineering research and technology development agenda for liquefaction remediation techniques that incorporates community knowledge, co-created through a series of facilitated focus groups with community members from communities along the Los Angeles River. The study of retrofit in Thrust 2 will engage with the unique opportunity presented by the ongoing evaluation and mitigation of vulnerable reinforced concrete buildings in response to the City of Los Angeles’ mandatory seismic retrofit ordinance. The engineering assessment will quantify the risk posed by the existing (unretrofit) buildings, in terms of probable repair costs and loss of housing, and the positive and negative impacts of retrofit (and demolition) engineering solutions. The process and design space of engineering solutions will be developed through solicitation of women’s and residents’ knowledge, priorities and perceptions, through semi-structured interviews and surveys.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.