Collaborative Research: Regulatory Pragmatism and Building Codes for Hazard-Resilient Housing

对人们来说，生活中没有什么比家更重要的了。建筑规范是一种主要的监管形式，也是国家和社会在面对飓风和地震等灾害时试图确保家园安全的主要机制之一。该项目推进了理解和改善住房设计和建造中关键抗灾实践合规所需的科学。它使用监管实用主义的概念来应对这一挑战，该概念认为，提高住房库存弹性和减少灾害对住房的影响，可能需要优先考虑建筑规范的那些方面，使建筑商能够以最便宜和最有效的方式实现这些目标。通过工程评估，结合对建筑商和居民的访谈和调查，该项目正在收集必要的数据，以设计有用的干预措施，以提高对关键抗灾建筑规范的遵守，从而保护人类生命和建筑环境免受灾害的影响。尽管建筑规范涉及到许多人的生活，但很少有研究研究监管策略和健全工程如何共同减少灾害风险。项目工作的目的是检查建筑商和家庭是否遵守关键的抗危险建筑实践，并探索影响遵守的因素，包括家庭和建筑商的态度和经验、当地法规、感知和实际成本以及当地建筑实践。与此同时，至关重要的是，该项目将使用基于性能的工程方法，在住房安全和事后住房占用方面，量化符合抗灾建筑规范的收益和风险。这些研究结果将用于根据关键建筑实践在减少灾害风险方面的有效性及其可实现性（例如，在成本和与当地建筑实践的兼容性方面）来确定和优先考虑关键建筑实践。在初步调查结果的基础上，该项目将考虑设计和评估一种务实的、促进遵守的干预措施。该项目在美国阿拉斯加和波多黎各两个多灾害环境中进行，提供了一个最不同的比较，以探索建筑实践、合规和干预结果如何根据社区特征而不同。它还将涉及对学生的跨学科培训，以支持培养一支受过培训的劳动力队伍，以应对与抗灾住房相关的监管和工程挑战。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Few aspects of life are more important to people than their homes. Building codes are a major form of regulation and one of the primary mechanisms by which states and societies try to make their homes safe in the face of hazards like hurricanes and earthquakes. This project advances the science needed to understand and improve compliance with key hazard-resistant practices in the design and construction of housing. It approaches this challenge using the concept of regulatory pragmatism, which argues that improving housing stock resilience and reducing disaster impacts for housing may necessitate prioritizing those aspects of the building code that allow builders to most cheaply and effectively reach these goals. Through engineering assessment, combined with interviews and surveys of builders and residents, this project is collecting the data necessary to design useful interventions to increase code compliance with key hazard-resistant building practices and, in so doing, protect human life and the built environment from the effects of a disaster. Despite the fact that building codes touch the lives of many, there is little research studying how regulatory strategies and sound engineering can together reduce disaster risk.Project work aims to examine compliance with key hazard-resistant building practices among builders and households, and explore the factors that influence compliance, including household and builder attitudes and experiences, local regulations, perceived and real costs, and local building practices. Crucially, in parallel, the project will use performance-based engineering methods to quantify the benefits and risks associated with complying with hazard-resistant building practices in terms of housing safety and post-event housing occupancy. These findings will be used to identify and prioritize key building practices based on their effectiveness in reducing disaster risk and their achievability (e.g., in terms of cost and compatibility with local building practices). Building on initial findings, the project will then consider the design and assessment of a pragmatic, compliance-fostering intervention. The project is conducted in two multi-hazard U.S. contexts, Alaska and Puerto Rico, providing a most-different comparison to explore how building practices, compliance, and intervention outcomes differ based on community characteristics. It will also involve interdisciplinary training of students supporting the development of a workforce trained to address regulatory and engineering challenges associated with disaster resilient housing.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.