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This paper sets out to explore the different ways in which communities deal with earthquakes. As is well known, the ability to recover from a damaging earthquake varies greatly across the world. The events of 2010 were of course a striking reminder of this, when the death toll from the Haïti earthquake was at least 100,000; in the very different conditions of Chile, a much larger event the same year killed just 525 people. In a narrow sense, much of the difference can be explained in terms of the engineering properties of the physical infrastructure affected; the better it has been designed and constructed to withstand strong ground shaking, the greater the chance that the community affected has of recovering quickly. However, the central thesis of this paper is that the ability of a community to deal with earthquakes involves much more than just technical factors. Seismically resilient buildings and other infrastructure will only be in place when an earthquake strikes if there has been a willingness and ability to devote the necessary resources to building them. Moreover, taking prior steps to limit physical damage is only one part of the process for dealing with earthquakes; providing for immediate post-earthquake needs and for the longer term rebuilding of communities is also important. To pursue these issues further, and how they might affect engineers, I visited four widely differing regions of high seismicity. During this study tour, I examined the societal context in which seismic engineers operate and talked to many people involved in earthquake protection and response. The intention was to identify the ways in which the ability of communities to deal with earthquakes depend on societal factors such as economics, politics and more general cultural dimensions. Based on these investigations, I believe that seismic engineers can contribute more effectively to ensuring successful outcomes after an earthquake strikes if fully aware of these societal factors. We need to look beyond our narrow technical field of providing earthquake resistant facilities and widen our vision to consider the complex systems, both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, in which those facilities will operate. E. F. Schumacher’s famous book (Schumacher 1973) ‘Small is beautiful’ has the subtitle ‘the study of economics as if people mattered’. I believe that seismic engineering should be practised ‘as if people mattered’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]