Megacities Today, Rubble Tomorrow: Haiti as Architectural Wake-Up Call [UPDATE: Chile]

Disasters in Haiti and Chile show architecture is the problem--and the solution--for earthquake-prone cities.

This week in The New York Times, Andrew Revkin published a wake-up call for megacities: Learn from Haiti; you might be next. And the problem is architecture. Earthquakes don't kill people, he says. Buildings do. "In recent earthquakes, buildings have acted as weapons of mass destruction," Roger Bilham, a seismologist who Revkin interviews, wrote in Nature. Most of the buildings in the...