Effective environment indicators on improving the resilience of Mashhad neighborhoods

Abstract

The concept of urban resilience has drawn more attention in recent years, especially in terms of urban planning. This concept is particularly highlighted when a city or community encounters threats such as natural hazards and rapid population growth. To respond to these threats, a comprehensive resilience assessment is required to identify priority areas for disaster risk management. Resilience is a multi-faced and complex concept, and any effort to evaluate it must take into account its social, economic, physical, and environmental dimensions. The city of Mashhad, as the second-largest city in Iran, is one of the most vulnerable cities due to being surrounded by several active faults, including Toos, Kashfarood, and Shandiz-Sang Bost. Since this city is located in a moderate to high earthquake risk zone, it is very necessary to pay attention to the resilience of this city against the earthquake crisis and implement management measures to increase the resilience capacity of this city. Accordingly, this study aims to evaluate urban resilience's capacity by introducing various indicators that promote resilience. This study focuses on two main domains: resilience dimensions and resilience criteria. This research has integrated three dimensions of resilience: social, cultural, physical, environmental, and economic, with four criteria of a resilient city: resistance, adaptation capacity, redundancy, and recovery to measure resilience capacity. A wide range of indicators covering all dimensions of resilience has been identified, enabling us to understand how resilient an area is structurally and functionally in the face of a natural disaster. Four neighborhoods of Mashhad (Khajeh Rabi, Sajjad, Honarestan, and Hijab) were selected as case studies. To calculate resilience capacity, each indicator of resilience dimensions was scored based on the analysis of statistical data and expert opinions. Findings show that all selected neighborhoods represent a moderate resilience against disasters like an earthquake. However, Sajjad has a higher resilience to face unexpected circumstances like an earthquake than the other three neighborhoods. According to the research findings, more structural and non-structural measures should be taken to improve resilience capacity, especially in the neighborhoods of Khajeh Rabi, Hijab, and Honarestan. This study concludes that urban resiliency in selected neighborhoods is strongly associated with social indicators such as residents' knowledge and awareness, the level of public participation, economic indicators including income and employment, as well as physical-environmental status in terms of urban and health infrastructure. The proposed framework for evaluating urban resiliency using various indicators in this study can be served as a basis for further investigations and development of methodologies that simultaneously consider the temporal and spatial dimensions of resilience.

An overview of the state of urban resilience in Iran

“…Resilience has long been a concept of great interest in a wide range of disciplines, including biology and ecology (Holling, 1973; Adger et al , 2005), psychology (Garmezy, 1974), physics and engineering (Bodin and Wiman, 2004; Brown, 2014), social sciences (Adger, 2000; Adger et al , 2005), economics (Rose, 2004), mathematics (Brown, 2014) and urban planning (Sharifi, and Yamagata, 2016a; Meerow et al , 2016; Sharifi and Yamagata, 2018; Datola et al , 2019; Moradi et al , 2021). Recently, the resilience theory has attracted a lot of attention in policy and funding (Meerow and Newell, 2015; Meerow et al , 2016; Fekete and Fiedrich, 2018).…”

“…The concept of resilience is multifaceted and has many dimensions, including social, economic, physical, infrastructural, environmental, institutional, etc. (Sharifi and Yamagata, 2016b; Moradi et al , 2021). Social resilience is defined as the ability of societies to cope with events and crises and adapt to everyday challenges (Cutter et al , 2010; Burton, 2012; Keck and Sakdapolrak, 2013).…”

“…This concept becomes more important, especially when a city or community is threatened by a natural disaster or other crises. To respond to such threats, understanding the state of city resilience and planning to enhance it is indispensable (Moradi et al, 2021) to protect people, communities and countries, as well as livelihoods, welfare, health, cultural heritage, socio-economic capital and natural resources [UNISDR (United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction), 2015]. In other words, the first step toward reducing the risk of disasters and promoting a culture of resilience is to understand the state of resilience of communities in the face of disasters (Hosseinioon, 2018;Maroufi and Borhani, 2021).…”

Evaluation and Factor Analysis for Urban Resilience: A Case Study of Chengdu–Chongqing Urban Agglomeration

“…Khan et al (2021) [36] used structural equation modeling to study and discover that geographic location, government decision-making, and urban financial conditions have a significant impact on urban resilience and gave related methods to improve urban resilience. Moradi (2021) [37] used the expert scoring method to find that economic indicators and physical environment conditions are all important factors for improving the urban resilience of Iran's second-largest city, and also put forward suggestions for improving urban resilience.…”

“…Additionally, combined with domestic and foreign urban resilience evaluation index systems [45], this paper selects 25 specific indicators to build the evaluation index system (as in Table 1). Per capita GDP (CNY) [46] + Proportion of tertiary industry in GDP (%) [28] + Per capita investment in fixed assets (CNY) [47] + Dependence on foreign trade (%) [31] + Proportion of fiscal revenue in GDP (%) [47] + Per capita disposable income of urban residents (CNY) [37] +…”