Improving organisational resilience to disaster events: an FM perspective

Background and aim - Improving the resilience of business organisations and critical infrastructure providers to disaster events is a major challenge facing many European organisations. Recent floods in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and earthquakes in Iceland, Italy, Romania and Greece have demonstrated the need for organisations to adopt...

Adaptive Resilience of Complex Safety-Critical Sociotechnical Systems: Toward a Unified Conceptual Framework and Its Formalization

Resilience is commonly understood as the capacity for a system to maintain a desirable state while undergoing adversity or to return to a desirable state as quickly as possible after being impacted. In this paper, we focus on resilience for complex sociotechnical systems (STS), specifically those where safety is an important aspect. Two main...

Adaptive capacity of the Pearl River Delta cities in the face of the growing flood risk: Institutions, ideas and interests

Although the cities in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in China are amongst the world’s cities most exposed to flooding due to climate change, surprisingly little is done to address this problem. This article explores the barriers to the emergence of policies adapting to the growing flood risk in two PRD cities, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, underlining...

Understanding Adaptive Capacity in Real Estate and the Built Environment: Climate Change and Extreme Weather in New York City

With climate change well underway, cities worldwide are struggling to develop and apply knowledge that will help advance social, environmental and economic adaptation to extreme weather and changing ecologies. Nowhere is this need more pressing than in the design, development and management of the built environment in New York City. In...

FLEX 3.0: An instrument to formulate the demand for and assessing the supply of the adaptive capacity of buildings

Market developments show increased demands for flexibility and sustainability by users and owners of buildings. A direct connection can be made between adaptive building and sustainability. The longer a building can keep its functional life cycle instead of becoming vacant or being demolished, the more sustainable a building will be. One way of...

FLEX 4.0: A Practical Instrument to Assess the Adaptive Capacity of Buildings

Adaptive buildings are green buildings. But the question is: how to measure green? A direct connection can be made between adaptive building and sustainability. Market developments show increased demands for flexibility and sustainability by users and owners as well as a growing understanding of the importance of a circular economy. Since 2014 a...

Towards a more resilient built environment

Over time, humankind’s lifestyle became increasingly dependent on finite resources. It follows that such a system is unable to sustain itself indefinitely. Several studies show that in the near future the climate may radically change and oil production will peak. Changes in the natural environment will possibly be so overwhelming that man has to...

Towards a more resilient built environment

Over time, humankind’s lifestyle became increasingly dependent on finite resources. It follows that such a system is unable to sustain itself indefinitely. Several studies show that in the near future the climate may radically change and oil production will peak. Changes in the natural environment will possibly be so overwhelming that man has to...