Evaluating the Rate of Urban Vulnerability Based on the Passive Defense Principals (Case Study: Hamedan City)

Decreasing the vulnerability of urban land uses which leads to the reduction of damages is considered as the most important goals that urban planners and managers have attempted to implement it in cities. It would be possible through applying new approaches of crisis management such as passive defense that can be effective in creating urban environments. The present research is aimed to study the vulnerability of Hamedan city based on the principles of passive defense. The study is an applied research based on its purposes and it is analytical-descriptive one in terms of nature. Data analysis was done based on passive defense framework. For data analysis, 9 main land uses and 23 subsidiary land uses are compared and scored using Super Decision software. By evaluating criteria and sub-criteria to which the closeness-farness from the main criteria or density-dispersion towards them are important, the distance was calculated in ArcGIS environment. Following the afore-mentioned procedures, Hamedan city is classified in 5 categories (i.e. very high, high, medium, low and very low) in terms of vulnerability. The most important risk factors of Hamedan city can be mentioned as: high population density in some neighborhoods around the first ring of Hamadan, the construction density in neighborhoods around Sepah square, Khezr and places around Rajaee Street, the fine-grainedness of residential units, the lack of open spaces and green spaces in the old neighborhoods of Hamedan and the concentration and centralization of official buildings in several parts of the city.