In 2000, researchers from the Mississippi State University ERC for Field Simulation, Carnegie Mellon, and the Pacific Earthquake ERC at UC Berkeley collaborated through an ERC Program Connectivity award (EEC 9910786) to study the feasibility of jointly developing advanced computational and information technology for simulating the effects of earthquakes in urban regions. Results from this pilot study in FY 2001 indicated that, while simple structural models can provide a first order simulation of structural performance, more realistic models are needed to represent the amount and distribution of damage to the built-infrastructure in large urban regions. To address this problem, the same group of researchers has just been funded (EEC 0121989) to use the simulation environment to investigate the effects of earthquakes in urban regions on the built-infrastructure and to simulate the performance of collections of buildings and other structures in the Greater Los Angeles Basin and the San Francisco Bay Area. The results will contribute greatly to the present need for scientific and transparent methods to relate seismic hazard data to structural performance and loss, with the ultimate goal of forecasting the amount and distribution of damage throughout an urban region in the event of an earthquake. Forecasting damage and loss can be of great use for emergency planning and management purposes. Visualization of damage in an urban region can aid policy makers and stakeholders in making informed decisions on how to reduce earthquake losses.