Assessing Community Resilience in Urban Disaster Management

A resilient Community is a local community that can shortly restore its pre-disaster status drawing on its internal potentials and effectively utilizing external assistance. Based on the idea that during disasters, the physical structure should act together with the social content, this concept emphasizes on local community empowerment and effective local government supervision. For an effective mitigation, reducing risks for physical elements of a society should be accompanied by increasing social carrying capacity thresholds. The main five factors in an urban resilient community include management and monitoring, risk assessment, education and training, disaster mitigation, and risk preparedness. This paper presents the results of a community resilience assessment in District 17, Tehran Municipality. Research method includes direct observation and household surveys covering the main five factors of resilience. The statistical analysis of the results indicates a low level of resilience which could be enhanced by undertaking a series of recommended measures.