Destructive earthquakes, notably the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake in Japan and the 1933 Long Beach earthquake in California, prompted the first building codes requiring lateral force resistance. Engineers developed methods to design frames, shear walls and, later, base isolation and damping systems to keep buildings standing through ground shaking. Seismic codes increasingly governed building height, structure and even city layout in earthquake-prone regions. Microzonation maps now steer land use away from the most hazardous ground.
Seismic engineering and its codes made dense, tall construction survivable in earthquake zones, directly shaping building form and land-use planning along fault lines.