A non-scientist on one of my outbound flights asked why the international community did not rebuild Port au Prince before the earthquake, since those earth scientists who were paying attention knew something like this would happen (Bob Yeats, Eric Calais). She thought it would be cheaper than rebuilding afterwards, plus fewer fatalities. I don't have a good answer for this, but realistically, the international community was not going to come up with 14 billion $ that were raised after the quake, and it would have been difficult or impossible to impose the tear downs and reconstruction that would be needed.

We have the same problem with the southwestern part of Istanbul. Seismologists/geologists can come up with scenario earthquakes and seismologists can model the strong ground motion expected for different areas (is likely already beeing done at Kandilli observatory and other universities in Istanbul). Engineers can then tell whether a building is likely to collapse or not. See following post about Atakoy area.
Chris