COVID-19 Implications for Research and Education on Engineered Structures and Services
Education : exploration of historical data on the antecedents and consequences of changes in ESS design and use , to include collaborations with other disciplines such as archaeology and ethnography ; student / practitioner collaborations across multiple disciplines , focusing on the temporal framing of spaces and places .
Revisiting Criticality
As evident in many of the cases reviewed previously ( e . g ., private housing ), widespread adaptive behavior in response to COVID-19 has upended established notions of ESS criticality in various ways . For example , the U . S . Department of Homeland Security ( DHS ) defines critical infrastructure as , “ systems and assets that are so vital to the United States that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our physical or economic security or public health or safety .” Defining which systems are critical results in a prioritization of resources during the response to extreme events ( Theoharidou et al 2009 ), but what if the response to extreme events causes non-critical structures and services to fulfill a critical role , or critical ones to become liabilities ?
Purpose-built facilities have yielded mixed results in mitigating the adverse impacts of COVID-19 , and indeed have sometimes exacerbated those impacts . It would therefore be an error to exclude the role of ad hoc services and non-traditional facilities in mitigating pandemic hazards . We therefore recommend the study of ESS systems wherever they may be found . While this may lead to systems already designated as critical and used in standard ways , it may also lead to purpose-built facilities ( such as sports arenas , hotels and even parking lots ) used in ad hoc ways , as well as to otherwise innocuous structures and services that suddenly become essential to the preservation of human life . A striking example of the former are the many virtual spaces which have been pressed into service for commercial , governmental , and even spiritual uses . These virtual artifacts of design differ in fundamental ways from the tactile artifacts that are emblematic of the field of engineering .
Regulatory standards have sought to manage risk and costs by classifying the importance of structures based on criticality . This “ importance factor ” is closely aligned with the concept of highly centralized infrastructure , meaning that a small number of critical facilities bore the responsibility for ( and thus derived value and investment from ) potentially significant loss of life and or community disruption . Occupant vulnerability as a result of dislocation or displacement was not considered , despite the possibility of “ transfer trauma ” ( Beauvaus and Walters 2020 ). Nor was it ever imagined that the vast inventory of private residences would introduce a new model of distributed yet critical infrastructure , responsible for mitigating the spread of COVID-19 as well as for supporting healthcare , education and livelihoods during months of quarantine . These de facto critical facilities were
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