Amini Hosseini - Assistant Professor, Disaster Risk Management Research Center, International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology, Tehran, Iran
Hosseini - Assistant Professor in earthquake engineering at Islamic Azad University (South Branch), and president of Tehran Disaster Management Organization, Tehran, Iran

Old urban areas in mega cities are the most vulnerable parts against earthquakes. These areas normally have dense population, old and weak structures and narrow streets. Improvement of these areas should be the first priority for any urban redevelopment programs in seismic prone zones. In this paper the vulnerability of old urban areas in Tehran have been studied. For this purpose at first, the city of Tehran have been classified into different parts based on the different parameters including vulnerability of structures, evacuation places and routes, secondary disasters, size of blocks, etc. The results show that several parts of the city are vulnerable to a potential earthquake and show the important parts for reconstruction or retrofitting. Besides of this approach the physical characteristics of available road network in Tehran were also studied to evaluate the efficiency of them to be used as emergency roads after an earthquake. For this purpose the existing roads have been classified into two categories as primary (roads between disaster management centers) and secondary (links between the identified emergency response centers) emergency roads. The results of this evaluations would be explained in this paper.