Mahmood Hosseini - Associate Professor, Board Member of the Centre of Excellence on Disaster Management, International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (IIEES)
Hamid Fathi - Graduate Student, Urban and Regional Planning Group, Faculty of Architecture, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

What changes an earthquake into a natural disaster is lack of preparedness in human living environment; and that is why in developed countries “earthquake risk management” is based on regional and urban planning. In this paper the results of a study conducted on district number 14 of Tehran metropolis are presented. At first, the theoretical bases and the basic concepts are briefly reviewed. Then various structural and urban planning indices, which can be used for analytical modeling of the seismic vulnerability of urban environments, are introduced and discussed. To apply the analytical model to district number 14 of Tehran metropolis, as the case study, regarding the large number of involved indices, a problem solving technique is used, which is a combination of Delphi and AHP in a GIS environment. The categorized vulnerability criteria are weighted by weight factors based on the experts’ views. For vulnerability evaluation, at first the structural vulnerability of each building is estimated based on the corresponding indices, then the effect of urban conditions is taken into account as an amplifying factor using the corresponding urban indices. By using the results of analyses in a scenario based vulnerability evaluation procedure, the priority level of various parts of the district for implementation of preventing measures are obtained. The flexibility of the proposed analytical model makes it usable for any urban setting, without any limitation.

Regional and Urban Planning, Earthquake Risk Management, Vulnerability Evaluation, Delphi Technique, AHP Model, Tehran Metropolis, Structural and Urban Planning Indices