From Emergency Reconstruction to Adaptive Recovery: A Mechanics-Based Review of Circular and Resilience-Oriented Structural Design for PostSeismic and Post-Conflict Contexts

Abstract

Responding to seismic events and armed conflicts is among the most challenging environments for structural engineering. Design choices have long-term safety, recovery time, total resource use and environmental consequences. Modern seismic codes have had great benefit in avoiding collapse and death, but provide minimal guidance on how to manage damage, control residual deformation, enable reparability, and restore functional operations after the event—parameters that dictate the usability of the structure for the remaining portion of its life and that contribute to the life-cycle sustainability of the structure. Therefore, this article presents a mechanics-based view of circularity in structural engineering, treating it not as a standalone sustainability objective but rather as an emergent property of structural performance under extreme loading, including the localisation of damage, the limitation of residual deformations, and the enabling of rapid and resource-efficient repair and reuse of components. Using a PRISMA-informed narrative review process, 35 peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and 2025 provided insights into resilience-based seismic design, low-damage building systems, modular/prefabricated buildings, and circular material strategies. This review will assess how the cyclical responses to damage inflicted by both earthquake and military conflict along with the methods used to recover from them are dependent on a cyclical response characteristic, and examines the significant differences that exist between recovery from damage caused by an earthquake and recovery from damage caused by a military conflict, in addition to the new challenges presented by blast damage, interruption of governance, and extended timeframes for rebuilding. This study develops an integrative approach that combines structural mechanics, recovery performance, and circular-economy principles into a cohesive model to identify critical research needs, performance metrics, and codification requirements as we move from an emergency recovery phase to a phase that supports adaptive recovery, repair-based, and resilient structural designs.