The Resilient City: Defining What San Francisco Needs from its Seismic Mitigation Policies
This paper addresses one aspect of the broader policy problem related to making San Francisco resilient in the face of a disaster – the standards we use for deciding when a structure is “safe enough.” Our building code embodies hundreds of judgment calls about how strong structures should be, but the public and the policy makers generally have no idea what these standards mean, what the outcomes will be from the “black box” of engineering decisions.