Resilient architecture and infrastructure Sample Clauses

Resilient architecture and infrastructure. Resilience of architecture and infrastructure is imperative for people’s quality of life and the spatial quality of the environment that surrounds people in their daily life. In the RAMSES project architecture encompasses design and management of urban fabric ranging from buildings to public spaces, landscape and urban form. Infrastructure describes built assets (hard infrastructure) and all the institutions that are required to maintain the standards of living of a community (soft infrastructure). Infrastructure can be considered in terms of physical objects and networks or in terms of services. For users, assets owners and decision-makers the services that are provided are more important than the structures as such. This dual nature of resilience seems to run through all the topics in this work as illustrated by key differences and attributes listed in Table 2 below. Hard infrastructure Soft infrastructure Resist Adapt Built Social, economic, political Focused Comprehensive Engineering/technical Organizational Industrial, operators Institution, local authority Quantifiable Not (easily) quantifiable Technological fix Organizational fix Structural measures Non-structural measures Outcome-based Process-based Sectoral Non-sectoral Table 2: Resilience characteristics for hard and soft infrastructures. Even with imminent mitigation actions, society will undoubtedly be faced with a certain level of climate change impact. Changes in average climate variables, along with changes in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, can be expected to have xxxxx consequences for the built environment in the form of flooding, heatwaves, water scarcity and other impacts. Buildings and infrastructure, including roads and transport systems, energy, water, waste, vegetation and water bodies, and even public space, are designed to last for decades and are expensive to renovate or replace. As infrastructure assets have long operational lifetimes they are sensitive not only to the existing climate at the time of their construction, but also to climate variations over the decades of their use. For example, a substantial proportion of infrastructure built in the next five years, will still be in use long after 2030. If there is no “perfect” operational framework which encompasses all the dimensions of resilience, in practical terms, asset owners, local authorities, regulators and insurers face these issues on a daily basis. From an operational point of view, resilient bu...