Explaining the Socio-Economic Aspects of Urban Resilience against Earthquake: A Case Study, 4th District of Tabriz

Natural disasters, as natural phenomena, have always existed and will exist on the planet earth. The natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, storms and tornadoes often has a divesting impact on human settlements and caused heavy casualties for inhabitants; destroyed the structures and infrastructure of these areas and imposed enormous economic and social losses on societies and countries around the world. An overview of the history of studies shows that increasing the resilience of residents against natural disasters is affected by social, economic, environmental and managerial factors. In this applied research, descriptive-analytic method was used to study the indicators and factors affecting economic and social resilience and evaluate its rate in 4th district of Tabriz. The main objective of this paper is to study the social and economic aspects that affect the improvement of residents' resilience as well as the understanding the contribution of each factor to the resilience of residents in the 4th district of Tabriz city. Initially, economic and social criteria defined according to the research objective, and then sub-criteria such as population density, literacy status, unemployment statue, and economic value of the land and housing were selected for each criterion in order to better identification; analytical hierarchical analysis (AHP) was used to combine the sub-criteria of each group, so the final status of social and economic resilience of 4th district obtained in GIS system. The results indicate that 39.4 hectares from the studied area have an inappropriate resilience condition in contrast to 1167 hectares of the studied area, in terms of resilience, is in perfect condition. The relatively inappropriate, moderate, and relatively good resilience of the socio-economic state include 174, 259.7 and 434 hectares of the study area, respectively.