Measuring urban resilience against flood risk using a multi-criteria approach (Study case: Areas located on the rivers of Tehran city)

Measuring urban resilience can help develop appropriate strategies and policies for cities facing unexpected shocks and their consequences. Since urban resilience is a complex concept and difficult to operationalize, developing a technique or method to actualize this concept is a major milestone in understanding the factors and interactions that help create and maintain resilience. Tehran's metropolis has a high concentration of industries, government organizations, services, and facilities, which makes its management very complicated when a natural disaster occurs. Previous conditions or inherent socio-economic characteristics show that Tehran is not immune from flood forces. In fact, it is important to measure resilience against urban disasters for areas located on rivers in Tehran due to its inherent characteristics and spatial-temporal changes of floods in the region. This research focuses on measuring the resilience of the areas located on the rivers of Tehran. The measurement approach is based on creating a composite index based on six dimensions of social, economic, institutional, infrastructure, social capital, and environmental resilience against floods. This research has been done by developing a mixed multi-criteria decision-making method. The AHP model has been used for prioritizing the selected indicators and the TOPSIS model has been used to rank the areas located on the rivers of Tehran city based on their resilience levels. The results show that region 22 is the most resilient region, while regions 4, 5, and 14 have the lowest resilience levels. The findings of this research can help urban planning organizations such as Tehran Research Planning Center to integrate disaster resilience in urban planning and change from reactive plans to preventive urban adaptive strategies such as risk-sensitive urban land use planning.