The effects of 23 October and 9 November 2011 earthquakes on spatial transformation of the Van City

Earthquakes of 23 October 2011 and 9 November 2013 caused significant destruction on existing built-up areas of Van City, Turkey and had led to great loss of life and property. With the aim of identifying the effects of these two high-destructive earthquakes on spatial transformation process of the city, as well as to evaluate applied urban transformation strategies concerning to remove and mitigate the unfavourable effects of these earthquakes, maximum likelihood classification (MLC) is applied on related RapidEye satellite images to find out the urban macro-form changes, the change detection outputs by means of MLC results of the RapidEye satellite images dated before and after earthquakes which indicate that the overall accuracies are computed over 80%. The general results also reveal that the accuracies obtained are very promising to analyse spatial effect of the earthquakes on spatial transformation of the city. The identified findings of this analysis provide useful inputs to forthcoming researches aiming to evaluate the success of those kinds of urban transformation processes that may occur after similar natural disaster cases.