Concrete ideas

I attended the fifth International Symposium on New Technologies for Urban Safety of Mega Cities in Asia (USMCA) last month because, like most planners, I am interested in disasters: learning lessons from past ones, preventing future ones, planning to respond to the ones that will inevitably happen.

The conference offered two days of 15-minute presentations on tsunami and earthquake warning systems, remote sensing and monitoring technology, environmental impact modeling, construction techniques and materials science, among other topics.

Giving new meaning to the word "estoric," I counted 15 presentations just on the subject of concrete.

Sponsored by the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) School of Engineering & Technology and Japan's International Center for Urban Safety Engineering (ICUS) at the University of Tokyo, the conference was attended by 80 academics, government administrators and planners.

Sound boring? Check out these videos of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings on the world's largest shaking table, replicating the effects of an earthquake.

Speaking of concrete: Be sure to watch the clips (starting at 1:00 minute elapsed play time) showing what happens to a concrete column in the building's basement. Scary.

More videos like this can be seen at the Hyogo Earthquake Engineering Center of Japan's National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention. If you want to see a structure actually collapse, watch the video of the wooden houses.

I was one of only two business people who attended USMCA, so far as I could tell. The other was an EH&S guy from Japanese construction giant Obayashi Corporation, who gave a great presentation about worksite safety at the new Suvarnabhumi Airport in Thailand.

Why did I attend, and why is this relevant?

In the next 15 years, the world's largest cities ("mega cities") will be in Asia, including the four biggest, five of the top 10, and 11 of the top 25. I live and work in Asia.

My thinking goes like this: Where people are concentrated, there will be businesses, and therefore business risk - and therefore the need for emergency response, crisis management and business continuity planning. And that's what I do for a living.

One other reason I attended: the conference was in Phuket, Thailand – a resort paradise.

My conference evaluation form would have looked like this if the organizers had distributed one (they didn't):

• The conference organizers were endlessly solicitous and appreciative that I'd come. And the conference venue was lovely.

• The quality of the presentations was uneven. Some were intriguing (like the videos above), but some were read-the-PowerPoint-bullets-aloud dull. The language of the conference is English, but English is not the first language of most of the presenters. I'd be frightened – terrified - of giving a presentation in Urdu, Thai or Japanese. But at a meeting where the exchange of ideas is the main purpose, a presenter's inability to understand or respond to audience questions is a serious hindrance to the exercise of academic rigor.

• Sixty-six of the 85 attendees gave presentations. That's not a sustainable formula. If there are that many deep-thinkers who have something worthwhile to present, the audience is going to have to get bigger because the presenters will eventually stop paying the registration fee to present to each other.

• USMCA might benefit by luring more private-sector participants to provide a dose of commercial reality. This will require a change in attitude for some participants. One woman representing a government agency (and who later gave a presentation) shook my hand, looked at my business card and reacted by remarking dejectedly, "Oh. A company." And walked away abruptly.

Mega-cities of the future will rely on academics to demonstrate beyond doubt that using reinforced concrete in commercial buildings, for example, will save lives. Mega cities will also rely on enlightened governments to formulate and enforce building codes transparently, effectively and uniformly.

But it will be companies, investors and business people who build the offices, homes and factories of the future mega-cities, not policy wonks or scholars. The private sector has the capital, the commercial incentive and the managerial capability. It makes sense to ask them to come listen, and to listen to their reactions. Doing so will certainly increase the pool of potential participants in future USMCA conferences.

It may be a while before BCP is a common practice in Dhaka, Bangladesh, but that's where the 2007 USMCA will be held next year.

Bring your disaster videos.