A New Model for Assessing System Performance and Resilience of Traditional Bazaars against Earthquake; Case Study: Tabriz Historical Bazaar

Traditional bazaars, as cultural and economic centers of historical cities, are among the most vulnerable urbanfabrics in Iran. Therefore, natural hazards may destroy historical and cultural assets in these areas, disrupt thebusiness of many people and cause significant casualties and economic loss. Considering that such bazaars havemany differences with other urban fabrics, thus, applying conventional risk and resilience assessment methods formeasuring the resilience of traditional bazaars may not provide appropriate results, and new models should bedeveloped for resilience assessment in such urban fabrics. Accordingly, in this paper, a new model to estimate thesystem performance of these urban fabrics that have historic and commercial value against earthquakes isintroduced. The proposed model provides a comprehensive approach based on the system performance to be used inearthquake resilience assessment of traditional bazaars. For this purpose, some indicators related to differentdimensions of earthquake resilience were classified into physical, economic, social and organizational dimensions,based on the relevant scholarly articles. In addition, a new aspect entitled the cultural-historical dimension (which isvery important in assessment of the resilience of traditional bazaars) was introduced, and indicators related to thisdimension were also added to the framework. Then, a questionnaire-based survey was conducted to assess theweights of parameters and their relevant indicators. Finally, the new model was developed based on integration ofdifferent parameters and indicators considered their weights and values.In order to test the applicability of the proposed method, Tabriz Traditional Bazaar (as a World Heritage) wasselected as case study and the overall system performance of this bazaar against earthquakes has been calculated.For this purpose, the values of different dimensions and indicators were integrated based on their weights. Bycalculating the average of the total performance at each section, the total performance of Tabriz bazaar wasestimated to be 54%. This shows that currently the bazaar does not have good condition and in case of anearthquake, different physical damage, socio-economic loss and cultural consequences are expected and recoveryneeds a long time. By using this model, the effectiveness of different interventions in the bazaar for improvingresilience can be also estimated. This will help decision makers to implement the most efficient approaches toreduce the potential impacts of earthquake in this bazaar and select the areas for intervention based on cost - benefitanalysis. The proposed model can be utilized in similar old urban fabrics in other cities, after calibrating theparameters and their weights based on local conditions.