Decisions on selecting an appropriate site for temporary shelter used to be taken in a limited amount of time after a disaster. The need for a systematic method in this area inspired the MADM (multi-attribute decision making) for complex disaster management decisions. This research proposes a model for appropriate and systematic site selection for temporary shelters, before an earthquake, using a geographical information system and MADM based on an earthquake damage assessment. After the effective criteria for site selection of temporary shelters are determined, the geographical layers of these criteria are prepared for Municipal District No.1 of Greater Tehran, the capital of Iran. Given these attributes and the required shelter area (415-610 hectares), 14 zones are proposed initially. Various MADM methods are used for the final selection. The mean of the aggregated ranking results are determined, and 10 of the 14 initial zones are ranked.

Different models have been proposed for disaster management by researchers and agencies. Despite their efficiency in some locations, disasters are still a fundamental challenge in the way of sustainable development. The purpose of this research is developing a comprehensive conceptual model for disaster management using thematic analysis. In this regard, first, disaster management models are collected. In the next stage, the themes of each model are extracted and categorised in three phases. In the first phase that is descriptive coding, available elements in each model are extracted as code and the basic themes are recognised. Then, in the phase of interpretive coding, basic themes are classified in three categories that are called organising themes (i.e. hazard assessment, risk management and management actions). In the final phase, strategic management is selected as the global or overarching theme to integrate all the other themes. Based on thematic analysis, it can be concluded that disaster management has three main elements that are the three organising themes. Therefore, comprehensive model of disaster management should include these three elements and their sub-basic themes that is called the ideal or criterion type. Results showed that some scientists have looked at disaster management one dimensionally (one theme). Even in two-dimensional models, one dimension has advantage over the other one. While the proposed typology in this study showed that the comprehensive model should include all the three mentioned elements.

Experience from recent earthquakes such as Gilan, Zanjan, Bam and Lorestan earthquakes in Iran indicated that the constructed buildings are vulnerable against earthquake. Vulnerability of these structures is due to various reasons such as designing without considering seismic regulations, problems of regulations (design goals), implementation problems, changing of the building occupancy class, increasing the weight of building stories, adding new stories to the building and changing in architecture of building without considering structural system. So the main objective of this research is to examine the features of building configuration and their effects as for the damages to buildings in past earthquakes. For this purpose, initially four occurred earthquakes in Iran are selected as case study. Then three types of buildings (steel structure, concrete structure and masonry buildings) are analyzed with details. Results showed that the most of damages are occurred in the old steel structures and masonry buildings which their ages are more than 25 years. The study showed that most of the buildings in the study area are steel structure and masonry buildings while concrete structures are infrequent which most of them had no or slight damages. Therefore, the importance and need to enhance the performance of available buildings against earthquake forces by rehabilitating methods would be more important than before. Also results indicated that the decisions related to architectural plan which have significant effect on seismic performance of buildings, can be divided into three categories: configuration of building, restrictive formal architectural plan and dangerous structural components, as these categories are not obstacle of each other, it is possible that each category has an influential effect on others. So organizing the design decisions in this way is very important so as to manage their effects and interdependencies.