Residential Planning to Reduce Urban Fabric's Vulnerability to Earthquake Hazards A Case Study the Six District, Tehran

Geographical location and seismic records of many Iranian cities, including Tehran, draw attention to the vulnerability to earthquake hazards in various fields and specialties. Due to its nature, urban planning examines this issue in the urban fabrics. In line with this, the present study investigates the texts and documents related to the earthquake and the role of urban planning in reducing its effects in terms of safety issues of settlements as well as crisis management. The residential fabric planning and its dimensions and features (including land use, plotting, texture formation, density, communication network, open space, service centers), as interfaces between the residential fabric and vulnerability, and thus the linkage between crisis management in these contexts and urban planning provides an operational model for earthquake vulnerability assessment of the residential areas in the 6th District of Tehran. This model is based on two important issues related to earthquake: the destruction rate and the number of human casualties, divided accordingly into two categories of factors and sub-factors. Based on this model, indicators were determined to study the vulnerability level. The physical resistance index of the fabric was extracted from the first category of the model sub-factors and the post-crisis fabric accountability index was extracted from the second one. Based on these 15 indicators, the vulnerability of the 6th District of Tehran was investigated separately for the residential neighborhoods. The vulnerability of residential neighborhoods was evaluated based on the values of evaluation factors extracted using the AHP method. Finally, the goals, strategies and policies needed to reduce the vulnerability according to the coefficient of significance were obtained separately for 7 neighborhoods using the same method. Based on the results, the following measures can be effective in promoting the safety of neighborhoods in the 6th district against earthquakes: setting objectives for increasing the physical strength of the fabric in order to reduce the destruction rate and increase the fabric efficiency in post-crisis response and relief efforts to reduce human mortality, and adopting strategies for increasing resistance in residential buildings and to strengthen the role and efficiency of open spaces, creating and strengthening an effective access network appropriate for the population, and controlling and guiding demographic indicators. In general, the proposed solutions are developed in five categories: the general form of residential fabric (segmentation, distribution, neighborhood...), green spaces and public open spaces, access networks, population density, and construction monitoring and supervision. Finally, the spatial priority of the implementation of proposed policies for neighborhoods, as well as the priority of policy implementation in each neighborhood is determined to look at the developed goals and strategies more efficiently.