Many cities of the world suffer from air pollution because of poor planning and design and heavy traffic in rapidly expanding urban environments. These conditions are exacerbated due to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. While there have been studies linking the built environment and air pollution with health, they have ignored the aggravating role of UHI. The past urban planning literature in this field has also ignored the science of materials, vehicles and air pollution, and technological solutions for reducing cumulative health impacts of air pollution and UHI. Air Pollution, built environment and human health are complex discussion factors that involve several different fields. The built environment is linked with human health through opportunities of physical activity and air quality. Recent planning literature focuses on creating compact and walkable urban areas dotted with green infrastructure to promote physical activity and to reduce vehicle emission-related air pollution. Reduced car use leading to reduced air pollution and UHI is implied in the literature. The literature from technology fields speaks to the issue of air pollution directly. Zero emission cars, green infrastructure and building materials that absorb air pollutants and reduce UHI fall within this category. This paper identifies main themes in the two streams of urban air pollution and UHI that impact human health and presents a systematic review of the academic papers, policy documents, reports and features in print media published in the last 10–20 years.

Natural hazards are processes that serve as triggers for natural disasters. Natural hazards can be classified into six categories. Geophysical or geological hazards relate to movement in solid earth. Their examples include earthquakes and volcanic activity. Hydrological hazards relate to the movement of water and include floods, landslides, and wave action. Meteorological hazards are storms, extreme temperatures, and fog. Climatological hazards are increasingly related to climate change and include droughts and wildfires. Biological hazards are caused by exposure to living organisms and/or their toxic substances. The COVID-19 virus is an example of a biological hazard. Extraterrestrial hazards are caused by asteroids, meteoroids, and comets as they pass near earth or strike earth. In addition to local damage, they can change earth inter planetary conditions that can affect the Earth’s magnetosphere, ionosphere, and thermosphere. This entry presents an overview of origins, impacts, and management of natural disasters. It describes processes that have potential to cause natural disasters. It outlines a brief history of impacts of natural hazards on the human built environment and the common techniques adopted for natural disaster preparedness. It also lays out challenges in dealing with disasters caused by natural hazards and points to new directions in warding off the adverse impact of such disasters.

Traditionally, shallow spread footing-type foundations are used for medium span bridges supported on hard soil and rock strata. Such bridges are modelled with fixed supports and no soil–foundation–structure interaction (SSI) is normally considered. The investigation presented herein utilized a sub-structuring technique and finite element method (FEM) model for the analysis of a four-span bridge designed for five different rock classes and subjected to an ensemble of actual ground motions. SSI was incorporated through Winkler springs while non-linear behaviour of reinforced concrete pier column was modelled by an equivalent linear model. The results of the study were evaluated to delineate the effect of SSI and pier column non-linearity on seismic response parameters of bridges founded on rock. It was found that the soil–foundation–structure interaction couldn’t be neglected in all cases of rock classes and input ground motions. Furthermore, pier column non-linearity influenced bridge displacement and base shear more significantly than SSI. Impact of foundation rocking was also examined and was found to be rather insignificant on bridge response parameters due to high rocking impedance of properly designed bridge foundations.

Progressive collapse assessment of a reinforced concrete (RC) building designed only for gravity loads and lacking a dedicated lateral load resisting system was carried out using the alternate load path (ALP) method and finite element method (FEM) numerical model created in software SAP2000. Plastic hinge capacity of the members was evaluated considering flexure (M), axial force (N) and shear force (V) interaction and a validated procedure was devised to incorporate the plastic hinge capacity based on M-N-V interaction into the results obtained from the FEM model. It was found that consideration of M-N-V interaction resulted in plastic hinge capacities that were lower than the flexure-only capacity of the plastic hinges available in the FEM software which caused the progressive collapse to initiate at a lower load and also resulted in increased collapse area. In the second part of the study, it was demonstrated that the progressive collapse resistance of the building for the interior and the edge column removal scenarios was appreciably improved after ordinary moment frames were cost-effectively designed at selected locations without increasing member cross-sectional dimensions. However, key element design concept approach was needed for improving the progressive collapse performance for the corner column loss scenarios. Relative reduction in the plastic hinge capacity due to M-N-V interaction as compared to flexure-only hinge capacity was found to be lower for the redesigned building due to improved member capacity.

Stay cables in cable-stayed bridges are susceptible to vibrations due to their inherent flexibility and low damping. Different countermeasures to control such vibrations have been extensive...

A general framework for structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridges employing system identification (SI) and performance evaluation methodology based on sparsely recorded seismic data is presented. Components of SHM are described and a theoretical formulation for SI of a non-classically damped, base-isolated bridge system is derived and implemented for four bridges. The performance of the base-isolated super-structure is examined by comparing the behavior of isolation bearings with the experimental results carried out in the laboratory. The influence of soil–structure interaction (SSI) is examined by comparing the identified values with the theoretical physical properties of the pile-supported sub-structure. It is concluded that the proposed SI methodology is effective and the proposed performance evaluation methodology can be implemented in SHM of bridges. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.