Page 115 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 4

Cenk Alhan - Mert Hacıemiroğlu

Introduction

A resilient settlement can be defined as a settlement that can show
resistance in the face of natural disasters and crises it encounters and
thus be able to continue its daily life without interruption (Aydın, 2022).
Achieving a sustainable development is only possible by creating resilient
cities that are not vulnerable against disasters (Erdogan et al., 2022).
Considering the production and transportation of building materials,
the raw materials and energy used in their construction, as well as the
negative environmental effects caused by waste generated at all these
stages and especially due to demolition (Esin, Coşgun and Aydın, 2013),
it is an undesirable result in all aspects that structures become unusable
due to an earthquake before completing their economic life. It is possible
to avoid all these disadvantages, to create cities that are sustainable and
resilient to earthquakes, which are among the greatest natural disasters,
only through designing and building earthquake-resistant structures.
On the other hand, designing a building as an earthquake-resistant
structure does not guarantee that it will never be damaged in an
earthquake or that it will be able to perform its function sustainably after
an earthquake. According to the Turkish Building Earthquake Regulation
(TBDY, 2018), for traditional fixed-base buildings (except high-rise
buildings), which will also be built new and with residential purposes,
normal performance target in the design earthquake ground motion
level (DD-2) is “Controlled Damage” in other words “the damage on the
building’s load-bearing system components which are not too severe
and mostly repairable, in order to ensure the safety of life”. In any case,
within the scope of the traditional earthquake-resistant structure design
philosophy, a part of the earthquake energy is consumed through the
damage caused to the structural elements. However, the whole picture
that emerged after the earthquakes has shown that even if life safety
can be ensured with this design approach, it is not possible for cities to
recover quickly and continue daily life to sustainably. In this case, there is
a need for alternative earthquake-resistant building design methods that
can provide higher earthquake performance in the creation of resistant
cities. One of these methods is seismic isolation, which becomes popular
both in the world and in Türkiye.
Seismic isolation is an earthquake protection method in which horizontal
flexible and vertical rigid supports are usually placed between the
superstructure and the foundation to extend the dominant period of the
structure, thereby reducing spectral accelerations by moving away from the
dominant period of the earthquake and ensuring that the superstructure

104 The Journal of Environment, Urban and Climate