Fereshteh ASLANI - Ph.D. Student, IIEES, Tehran, Iran
Kambod AMINI HOSSEINI - Associate Professor, IIEES, Tehran, Iran

In seismic prone countries, like Iran, the damages caused by strong earthquakes are so severe that the response to their impacts is often beyond the capacity of local governments (Shakib et al., 2011). Therefore, special attention should be paid to capacity building and increasing the preparedness for potential earthquakes. Improving resilience is one of the most significant approaches that can be addressed in this regard. The United Nations office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), formerly known as UNISDR, (United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction) (2017) defines resilience as the ability of a system or a society at risk to absorb the effects of crisis, resistance before collapse, and rapid reconstruction. During the last two decades the concept of resilience has gained much popularity in urban areas. However, there is still no unified classification on parameters of urban resilience (Scherzer et al., 2019). It is noteworthy that despite long decades of worthwhile researches in the field of disaster resilience, there are still a lot of unknown dimensions on this subject, especially regarding existing gaps between theories and implementation. Moreover, there are many challenges concerning the lack of suitable resilience frameworks and models against the disasters, especially at local level in the developing countries. Referring to Mayunga (2007), without a framework in which criteria and indexes can be defined and assessed, the disaster resilience concept will not be practical for disaster risk reduction. Accordingly, as shown in Figure 1, in this study, a new theoretical framework is developed for evaluation of the resilience of neighborhoods against earthquake. It seems that the criteria introduced in theory (including robustness, redundancy, rapidity and resourcefulness) (Bruneau et al., 2003) are not sufficient and comprehensive at the neighborhood level for assessment of the resilience, while they can be considered as a basis for such analysis. Therefore, in order to evaluate resilience at neighborhood level, along with these criteria, other criteria such as flexibility, adaptability, diversity, concentration, density, enclosure, readability, regularity, balance, cooperation, and solidarity should be also considered in implementation.

Earthquake, Resilience, Theory, Implementation, Neighborhood