Resilience engineering and the built environment

The possible relations between resilience engineering and built environments are explored. Resilience engineering has been concerned with the safe and efficient functioning of large and small industrial systems. These may be described as built systems or artefacts. The resilience engineering approach argues that if the performance of systems is to be resilient, then they must be able to respond, monitor, learn and anticipate. The last ability in particular means that they must be able to consider themselves vis-à-vis their environment, i.e. be sentient and reflective systems. In practice, this means people individually or collectively can adjust what they do to match conditions, identify and overcome flaws and function glitches, recognize actual demands and make appropriate adjustments, detect when something goes wrong and intervene before the situation becomes serious. It is particularly important to understand the range of conditions about why and how the system functions in the ‘desired’ mode as well as ‘unwanted’ modes. Resilience is the capacity to sustain operations under both expected and unexpected conditions. The unexpected conditions are not only threats but also opportunities.