The Assessment Social Vulnerability of Urban Areas against Earthquake Using Electric Model (Case Study: Abhar City)

Urban safety against natural hazards is one of the main goals of urban planning. Since Iran is considered as one of the first ten countries in the world for natural disasters, the management of the crisis is one of the necessities of urban planning. On the other, natural disasters such as earthquakes not only cause physical damage to physical infrastructure in earthquake-affected areas, but also the social structures of those areas will also be affected. Therefore, urban vulnerability assessment against these risks is not just limited to structural elements and their physical, social elements of these cities. Therefore, the present study aims at evaluating the social vulnerability against earthquake in four areas Abhar city. Taking into account the factors such as the age distribution of the population at risk during an earthquake, employment, education, number of people with disabilities, high-risk applications in the three indicators of economic, social and physical spaces towards risk and necessary applications are investigated. Research methodology is the quantitative and analytical approach. Library method was used in theoretical approaches. Moreover, the electrical methods were used to rank Abhar city areas of social vulnerability indicators. In this study, the weighting criteria AHP model is used. The findings indicate that social vulnerability is a result of social inequality in urban communities. Due to different social characteristics of different indices in various parts of the city Abhar, the regions have different vulnerability, as region 2 has the highest rate and region 4 the lowest rate of social vulnerability against the earthquakes.