Investigating the Resilience of Bandar Abbas Neighborhoods against Disaster

Abstract

Background: Urban planning and urban planning activities have increased the pressure on nature and weakened its resilience, often bringing negative and even irreparable consequences. Objectives: One of the most important issues in urban management in recent years is the emergence of resilient cities. Hormozgan is one of the most important provinces of the country, and Bandar Abbas, in the center of this province, is considered one of the major coastal cities of Iran from a national point of view. Methods: To identify and examine the resilience of Bandar Abbas against environmental crises, based on which an information base was created, the place and spatial information of this database was prepared in 5 criteria and 29 sub-criteria. They include 1. socio-economic criteria, 2. structural criteria, 3. access criteria, 4. physical criteria, and 5. Ecological criteria. In the next step, to weigh and value the research criteria and sub-criteria in the resilience model of Bandar Abbas, the network analysis method (ANP) was used. In this model, the first 50 questionnaires were prepared by the Delphi method and distributed among experts in the field of environment and disaster management. Results: The findings of this study indicated that the weight and value of ecological, socio-economic, physical, accessibility, and physical-structural criteria in resilience were 0.256, 0.236, 0.194, 0.171, and 0.141, respectively. Among the ecological criteria, the sub-criterion of distance from polluted points, the socio-economic criterion, the sub-criterion of access to medical-health centers, the sub-criterion of access to medical-health centers, among the physical-structural criteria, flood risk sub-criterion, and functional zone sub-criterion, and among access criteria, the sub-criterion of access to the fire station obtained the highest values in resilience. Conclusion: Environmental crises, such as earthquakes, floods, accidents, air pollution, and storms, have resulted in the environmental vulnerability of the city and posed serious threats to the security of Bandar Abbas. A thorough understanding of the vulnerability of Bandar Abbas against urban environmental crises will enable policymakers to propose management solutions to reduce vulnerability and risk and increase resilience. Consequently, the main goal of this study was to evaluate the resilience of Bandar Abbas against environmental crises. The results of this study can be of great help in the decision-making of city managers and the lives of city residents.