Designing for Disaster: The Role of Architecturally Integrated Autonomous Critical Infrastructure in Enhancing Community Resilience in Post-Disaster Recovery

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the opportunities autonomous critical infrastructure can provide in enhancing community resilience to post-disaster response. An analysis of existing methods of disaster response identified significant limitations in a top-down approach. The literature identifies an alternative method in a community based model. While this model provides improvement to a top-down response, the recognition of reliance in critical infrastructure in both models identifies a significant area to improving disaster response. Therefore, the study explores how independent critical infrastructure can be adapted to enhance a community response to disaster that enables critical resources for both survival and recovery. The study reviews the subject areas of disaster, community and infrastructure. The identification of key dynamics in renewable energy, immediate post-disaster and community resilience provide refined areas of focus. The study's correlation of these subject areas to inform disaster response identifies a literature gap with minimal existing investigation. The exiting literature and precedents suggest revision to opportumtJes and limitations in the surrounding subject fields. The study's response to these dynamics through the case study of the Miramar peninsula provides a framework that allows for the testing of original data, while providing methods to explore the study's hypothesis. The process through design investigates outcomes responsive of the dynamics of the peninsula and suggests interventions that provide a new model to enhancing post-disaster community resilience. The results illustrate methods to enable autonomous critical resources in power and water to function for a community in post-disaster. The significance of the study is developed through the revision of renewable infrastructure to exist within architecture and operate in both pre and post-disaster functions. The outcome of this approach identifies disaster dynamics before they occur. The ability to allow communities to actively acknowledge and operate critical disaster provisions instantly within their own community provides an approach to improving disaster response.