From earthquake resistance structure to earthquake resilience city–urban seismic resilience assessment

Earthquakes pose significant perils to the built environment in urban areas. To avert the calamitous aftermath of earthquakes, it is imperative to construct seismic resilient cities. Due to the intricacy of the concept of urban seismic resilience(USR), its assessment is a large-scale system engineering issue. The assessment of USR should be based on the notion of urban seismic capacity(USC) assessment, which includes casualties, economic loss, and recovery time as criteria. Functionality loss is also included in the assessment of USR in addition to these criteria. The assessment indicator system comprising five dimensions(building and lifeline infrastructure, environment, society, economy, and institution) and 20 indicators has been devised to quantify USR. The analytical hierarchy process(AHP) is utilized to compute the weights of the criteria, dimensions, and indicators in the urban seismic resilience assessment(USRA) indicator system. When the necessary data for a city are obtainable, the seismic resilience of that city can be assessed using this framework. To illustrate the proposed methodology, a moderate-sized city in China was selected as a case study. The assessment results indicate a high level of USR, suggesting that the city possesses strong capabilities to withstand and recover from potential future earthquakes.