Journal of Spatial Analysis

  Iran is a wide and great land that is located on Alps earthquake belt of Himalaya. Great part of the urban and village residency of the country have been exposed to the intensive earthquake and destructive. Sarab city with several other cities, including Tehran, Karaj, Abyek, Qazvin, Roudbar, Khalkhal ,Tabriz, Marand and khoy are located on Earthquake belt that Earthquake risk is too high.   In Eastern-Azerbaijan and Sarab, potential earthquake risk is very high, since there are a lot of active faults and historical evidences show the horrific and destructive earthquakes.   Sarab city located in the Sarab plain which have abundant faults in various directions. Earthquake as a natural phenomenon doesn’t have good results but what can make it a catastrophe, is the lack of prevention from its effects and no preparation for coping with its aftermaths.   The unsuitable establishment of structural elements and urban land-uses and atypical web of urban open spaces, the old ages of and low quality of the structures in the decayed area of the factors like this have main role in the increasing the amount of damage entered to the cities against to the earthquake.   It is necessary to reduce the vulnerability of the cities against the earthquake and to consider it as one of the main goals of the urban planning.   Main objective of this paper is planning for reduction of damages arising out of earthquake in Sarab city. The study area is the Sarab city with four urban regions and 15 districts. The present research is an applied study.   For this purpose, considering the goal of the study, nine factors including the type of structural materials, the quality of the buildings, the number of the floors, the population density, pedestrian width , the availability of open space and distance from river were identified and evaluated, so that for each of the indicators or factors, one layer of map with shp format was produced and then in an analytical hierarchy process and weighting to the variables, layers overlaying operation using available analytical functions was implemented in Arc Gis software. Finally the vulnerability map of the Sarab city was prepared. According to the results of AHP model, it is concluded that Sarab in terms of vulnerability has no appropriate status against earthquake risk so that the whole Sarab city is vulnerable to earthquake, but some of its neighborhoods due to low quality of buildings and vulnerability of streets network and inaccessibility to open areas and excessive compression are more vulnerable. Deteriorated urban area is one of the most vulnerable parts of the Sarab city during the occurrence of the earthquake. Therefore, to reduce the health and wealth damages which can cause by the earthquake in the city.