Oakland Resilience Initiative

As part of the Sustainable Cities course offered by the Stanford Program on Urban Studies, the goal of the project was to work with the City of Oakland and the 100 Resilient Cities Initiative to develop their Soft-Story Earthquake Retrofit Program that would help mitigate the damage incurred by Oakland’s inhabitants in the event of an earthquake. The team focused on using existing outreach and survey data to create planning tools for the City of Oakland that were visual and communicative.  Out of Oakland’s self-identified seven areas of vulnerability, our contributions could be understood as primarily addressing the areas of community planning and capacity building, as well as housing. Our four contributions were the production of a GIS risk map, a FEMA structural analysis of a statistically typical soft-story building, communicative online media, and a profile analysis of demographic preferences of Oakland residents. Our goal with these deliverables was to 1) inform the city of areas of greatest risk and 2) package the data into visuals that would make relative risk more clear to both planners and the community members. More information can be found in the project’s executive summary.