Exploring the collapse of buildings in urban settings

Abstract

The paper explores building collapses at the cross-cutting edges of urban sustainability and the socio-economic and political–cultural influences of vulnerability for the phenomenon – in departure from the traditional conceptualisation of the phenomenon as an ‘engineering’ problem. It confers insights into the influences of vulnerability for building collapse in the urban context and makes a case for a deeper level of analysis that places measures to tackle building failures within a comprehensive understanding of the vulnerabilities they are supposed to reduce.