A GIS-based Multi-Criteria Evaluation of Disaster Vulnerability in an Urban Space

Abstract

The notions of resilience and vulnerability are rapidly gaining ground in the urban sustainability and planning literature. The series of recent natural disasters around the world such as earthquakes, tsunami, and hurricanes, highlights the need for planning around natural hazard prevention and mitigation in human settlements. Historically, efforts have concentrated on recovery efforts, but rather than public engagement with emergency planning. Traditionally, most policy regarding disaster puts emphasis on the impact of natural phenomena. This notion has led to the dominance of technical interventions concentrating on prediction of hazards or modifying their impact. Catastrophic natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 taught us a hard lesson that traditional methods of communicating emergency information often fall short from the goal of reaching everyone in a community (Bates and Swan 2010). Accordingly, the incorporation of the notions of vulnerability and resilience in city’s emergency preparedness and disaster management has become a new frontier. In this study, I employed a multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) method within a geographic information system (GIS) framework to evaluate the vulnerability at of the City of Bothell to natural disasters at the census block level.