Our built environment is often developed in silos, with individual owners, engineers, and designers identifying opportunities, constraints, trade-offs, and costs solely within their project boundary, and with limited evaluation of the larger community impacts. To transition to a more resilient and equitable built environment, we must first understand who is most reliant on our community assets and infrastructure, and what resilience means to them. Using examples from Massachusetts and California, we will discuss how centering equity and climate risk in the design and decision-making process can help to mitigate harm and enhance benefits to those who have historically been adversely impacted by infrastructure decisions. This type of systems-based thinking requires policy-makers, designers, engineers, owners, and operators to think holistically about a resilient and just transition that ensures buildings continue to meet the needs of occupants, enables buildings to serve as grid assets, and keeps equity at the core of the conversation.

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