Resilience-Based Design Strategies for Buildings in Flood-Prone Areas

Abstract

Flooding is a serious threat to safety and to the integrity of urban infrastructure, the environment, and community resilience, especially in rapidly urbanizing and climate-vulnerable communities. Traditional building constructions frequently fail to offer adequate protection from the rising flood levels, and longer duration of flood inundation.Traditional building structures often fail to provide protection from rising flood water depths, from longer duration of inundation and related structural damage. The study explores the concepts of resilience to design in buildings located in flood risk areas, including structural protection, the use of flood resilient materials, raised foundations, sustainable drainage systems, and nature-based solutions. The study examines the building-level interventions that could be incorporated into urban planning and ecosystem-based measures to mitigate flood vulnerability through a qualitative review of literature and comparative analysis of current flood-resilience frameworks. Previously, the adaptation of urban design to the natural flood process was shown to be important, as was regional knowledge of the local flora and fauna, and the consideration of other flood-protection strategies in future adverse scenarios (Liao et al., 2016; Van Long et al., 2020; Rezende et al., 2019). The study also looks at the link between flood resilience and sustainable building performance, including possible trade-offs related to environmental impacts, implementation expenses, and recovery capability over the long-term (Phillips et al., 2017). This proposed method focuses on a ‘context-sensitive design’, ‘risk-based planning’ and ‘coordinated implementation of structural and nature-based measures’. Overall, resilience-based design represents a tractable approach to mitigate flood damage to buildings, to ensure the safety of building occupants, and to encourage sustainable development in vulnerable communities.