Urban Resilience

Today, social participation is considered as a crucial element in renewing urban life and enhancing resilience in confronting different crises. Regarding the troubles on the one hand and the limitations of tools and financial capacities of urban management on the other hand, districts with worn textures are taken as one of the main factors in decreasing the quality of life and increasing the vulnerability of cities. so, the most effective approach to choose for facing the shortcomings and imperfections is the participatory approach. This research aims to investigate the empowerment of local communities and the establishment of participatory management with a comprehensive practice along with the participation of citizens for renewing and reviving the worn urban texture of Zeinabieh district of Isfahan. This study was done by survey, documentary and analytical research methods. The results show that the participation of the residents for regeneration and renovation was somehow low in the mentioned district mainly due to their mistrust in the project executors. Having a feeling of satisfaction in the activities of the authorities and confiding in them is an element which paves the way for residents to boost their level of participation in regeneration and refurbishment of old textures. For this reason, the empowerment of residents was proposed as the most appropriate pattern for public involvement in the worn texture of the area under study. The use of such model creates the process of programming as well as the top-down decision makings which put emphasis on community indexes and accelerate citizen participation and confidence. Empowerment model, in practice, in addition to promoting the spatial-physical resilience, enhances the development of cultural and social resiliency through the reinforcement of social relations and the trust among the citizens on the one side and between the citizens and urban management on the other side.

The study of the resilience of the cities against earthquake is one of the necessities for the reduction of losses and death toll of the earthquakes. Resilience has various definitions and there is not a unique comprehensive model for its quantitative assessment. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive quantitative indicator for resilience and to study the efficacy of social and governance strategies in improvement of urban resilience against earthquake. To achieve this aim, first effective dimensions and indices of resilience of urban areas were explored and extracted by reviewing available research studies and experts elicitation method. Then based on experts’ opinions and pairwise comparison the model was justified and the relative weights for dimensions and indices were obtained and a comprehensive overall resilience index was introduced. Using the proposed index, the efficacy of different social and governance strategies were compared considering three different earthquake scenarios of North-Tehran, Ray fault, and floating faults. The comparisons were based on three metrics i.e. absolute value of resilience increase, distance from the origin of the Pareto chart considering implementation duration time and costs, and the ratio of cost to resilience increase. In this regard, strategy S3 (90 percent increase of social resilience), strategy S1 (10 percent increase of social resilience) and strategy S3 were the optimal ones based on the first, second and third metrics, respectively. On the whole, the social strategies had better efficiency than the governance ones, but it seems in practice the social and governance strategy categories must be implemented in an integrated manner which could be considered as a future research proposal.

Urban crises are a constant companion of cities and urban management tries to protect cities against these crises. One of the crises that requires management to improve urban resilience are tourism crises. Because in these crises, the tourism infrastructure may be damaged or the security of tourists and the entire tourism system may be destroyed. The purpose of this article is to analyze the relationship between urban resilience and tourism crisis management in Iran. The main question of the article is how improving urban resilience can help manage tourism crises in Iran? The method of this article is descriptive-analytical. The findings of the article show that industrial tourism is growing rapidly and generating income, but on the other hand, this industry is extremely fragile and has very little resilience to crises, in a way that by creating the slightest insecurity and disorder in the tourism infrastructure, it will be severely stagnated. Therefore, resilience of cities is in fact equal to the stability of the tourism system and the stability of the tourism system makes the tourism industry not be completely paralyzed in times of crisis.