This paper presents a conceptual framework to define seismic resilience of communities and quantitative measures of resilience that can be useful for a coordinated research effort focusing on enhancing this resilience. This framework relies on the complementary measures of resilience: “Reduced failure probabilities,” “Reduced consequences from failures,” and “Reduced time to recovery.” The framework also includes quantitative measures of the “ends” of robustness and rapidity, and the “means” of resourcefulness and redundancy, and integrates those measures into the four dimensions of community resilience—technical, organizational, social, and economic—all of which can be used to quantify measures of resilience for various types of physical and organizational systems. Systems diagrams then establish the tasks required to achieve these objectives. This framework can be useful in future research to determine the resiliency of different units of analysis and systems, and to develop resiliency targets and detailed analytical procedures to generate these values.

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Christchurch, New Zealand, experienced four major earthquakes (Mw 5.9 to 7.1) since 4 September 2010 that triggered localized to widespread liquefaction. Liquefaction caused significant damage to residential foundations due to ground subsidence, ground failure, and lateral spreading. This paper describes the land damage assessment process for Christchurch, including the collection and processing of extensive data and observations related to liquefaction, the characterization of liquefaction effects on land performance, and the quantification of losses for insurance compensation purposes. The paper also examines the effectiveness of several existing liquefaction vulnerability parameters and a new parameter developed through this research, Liquefaction Severity Number ( LSN), in explaining the observed liquefaction-induced damage in residential areas of Christchurch using results from 11,500 cone penetration tests (CPTs) as well as a robust regional groundwater model.