resilience

Overheating in buildings has been identified as an essential cause of several problems ranging from thermal discomfort and productivity reduction to illness and death. Overheating in buildings is expected to increase as global warming continues. The risk of overheating in existing and new buildings can be reduced if policy makers take decisions about adaptation interventions quickly. This paper introduces a methodology for supporting such decisions on a national level.

Buildings and communities need to be more resilient in the face of increasing weather extremes due to climate change. Current building models lack adequate definition to address this new challenge. This paper defines resilient design in terms of four ecosystemic factors: robustness, redundancy, feedback and co-evolutionary adaptivity. It builds upon previous work on usability and extends this to include resilient performance in relation to three new UK case studies covering retrofit and new build housing. In each case usability studies are evaluated in terms of resilient design.