Identification of Urban Vulnerability Indicators in Ilam City against Environmental Hazards with an Emphasis on Passive Defense Approach

Security is one of the main and fundamental factors which its lack leads to a crisis in societies (Alizadeh, 2016, p. 12). Mankind has always faced with threats in his life and construction, and he has experienced all kinds of events throughout history (Zangi Abadi, 2012, p. 114). The present age is the urban vulnerability age, because with the urban life’s complexity, cities are confronted with different natural hazards and technological crisis on the one hand, and social security crises on the other hand (Mohammadi Deh Cheshmeh, 2015, p. 212). Passive defense is one of the most significant concepts in the overall area of urban disaster management in order to secure the cities and establish the citizens’ welfare in all urban areas. Therefore, this paper attempts to investigate Ilam city’ vulnerability to environmental perils with an emphasis on passive defense approach. The method of this study was survey-descriptive and to collect data, the questionnaire tool of Amini-Varki et al (2014) with Cronbach’s alpha of 81.2% was used. The statistical population of this research is all urban management experts in Ilam city in related organizations that due to the lack of population size, by a randomized sampling method, a research questionnaire was distributed among the experts and finally information about 85 people were analyzed. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the demographic variables and to analyze the research hypothesis, one-way T test and Friedman test for ranking the factors in SPSS software were used. The results of this study showed that the most important indicator of environmental hazards was the average rating of 15.23 in terms of experts in both the organizational and managerial indicators and the last priority of the structure index of communication networks with an average rating of 5.18.