Assessment of urban resilience against earthquake risk(Case study: Tabriz Metropolis)

With the continuous development of urbanization, and the increase of uncertainty and risk, resilience has become an important criterion for urban safety. Urban systems, as dynamic and open space systems, present certain complex manifestations. Therefore, understanding urban resilience from the perspective of complex systems theory is important to achieve a full understanding of the composition and mechanism of operation of urban systems and then improve the scientific nature of urban system cognition and research. Urban areas have the largest population of the country and in addition to the nodes of consumption of resources and centers of innovation, theoretically and practically become the main area of ​​resilience testing against natural hazards, especially earthquakes. The aim of this study was to measure the resilience of Tabriz as the largest population center in northwestern Iran and at the same time one of the most seismic cities in the country against earthquake risk. This research is descriptive-analytical in terms of method and practical in terms of purpose. Based on this, Tabriz urban resilience has been evaluated based on 14 criteria in the form of 4 main components (social, economic, institutional, physical resilience) by Delphi method and by 50 experts. For data analysis, one-sample t-test, Friedman, Kendall and path analysis in the form of SPSS software were used. Findings showed that the resilience status of Tabriz city against the occurrence of a possible earthquake of social dimension, 2.19; in the economic dimension, 2.37; in the institutional dimension, 1.94; and in the physical dimension it is 2.57. In general, the resilience of Tabriz city against earthquakes, with an average of 2.33 is undesirable. Among the four components, the physical component with the sum of direct and indirect effects explains the alpha of 0.560 and is the most effective component in the resilience of Tabriz. The four dimensions of resilience, in total, could explain 0.345 of resilience in Tabriz.