Incorporate disaster management perspective into built environment undergraduate curriculum

The built environment profession is primarily concerned with design, construction, planning, procurement, management and technological aspects related to construction and maintenance of built environment structures. Nowadays, nevertheless, there is an emerging need of improving built environmental professionals‟ role within the disaster management discipline because the built environment has now been realised as a sector that can enormously add value to the entire disaster management process.
Provision of higher education in the related areas can be practical means to build disaster management capacities. There are few postgraduate and undergraduate degree courses currently available in the UK to provide disaster management education in relation to the built environment discipline. However, the critical role played by the built environment undergraduate degrees in offering the knowledge and skills relevant to disaster management process is seriously overlooked. The special professional knowledge, skills and competencies that need to be shared across all the built environment professions in relation to the entire disaster management process are established in the current literature. However, less is known about how changes could take place to reflect a disaster management perspective in the built environment undergraduate curriculum. Hence, this paper aims to explore the means of systemising the built environment undergraduate curriculum by integrating the concepts and practices of disaster management. A literature synthesis and a comprehensive desk review were carried out to review the existing UK undergraduate built environment curricular to understand the disaster management aspects placed within them. Finally, the paper maps built environment undergraduate curricular with knowledge and skills needed within the disaster management process in order to identify the gaps for curricular integration.