SEMINAR: Asian Studies Seminar Series

It is nearly 15 years since Dennis Mileti published Disasters by Design: a Reassessment of Natural Hazards in the United States, a title by which he somewhat ironically inferred that many disasters were the predictable result of interactions of hazards, communities and the physical infrastructure of the constructed environment. Yet through history, if the hazard was frequent enough, many peoples have built structures that were quite literally "designed" to accommodate such an event and minimise its consequences. Rather than being "disasters by design", these buildings were designed so to speak by disasters, a "seismic architecture" that represented a cultural adaptation by peoples to earthquakes. It is difficult, at times, to clearly identify specific instances when a better understanding of culture materially contributes to disaster risk reduction (DRR). Yet this "seismic architecture" provides a very visible manifestation of how culture is ineluctably intertwined with disaster risk management (DRM) not only in terms of practical adjustments to hazard but also as a form of long-term educational transmission through heritage.