An Explanation a Model for Enhancing Disaster Risk Management by Using Community-based Approach (CBDRM), Case Study: A Local Community in Tehran

Disasters are incidents that cause corruption of normal life, deviation from ordinary expectations of individuals and groups. The causes of the disasters are split into two groups: natural disasters and human-induced ones. Mostly, disasters have crucial negative effects on people, environment and economy. The city as a cultural capital cannot experience sustainable development in the right direction, Regardless of considering natural disasters and hazards. Lack of attention to this important fact is one of the most important strategic neglected point in urban planning. For this reason, in recent years, natural disaster risk management has become a serious issue. Lessons from past crises show that emergency response operations further than the responsibility of the government to deal with the crisis can be successful rescue and relief operations while reduce the harms if agencies, individual and group hold such responsibilities.. Attention to this issue resulted in the formation and growth of community-based approaches in the management of crises and natural disasters. Community-based disaster management can increase the performance during the disaster while develop vulnerability among people. Therefore, public sector is responsible for training the crisis management as well as land-use planning, development planning, and even environmental for a city. Regarding to this approach, decentralization of planning strategies in the field of risk management leads to the empowerment of local communities and their cooperation. The community should lead to increase the resilience of society. The concept of resilience in social and physical aspects of the city are intertwined. Due to limitations in the short term and the cost of their physical approaches, Community-based approaches will address to the needs in cities like Tehran. In this regard, in cooperation with the Organization of “Tehran prevention and crisis management” we selected District 20 to work on. The neighborhood planning concept based on social engineering, instead mental attitude and macro-scale, brings local balance and wisdom. In fact, this model seeks to identify hidden or forgotten features and capabilities of urban neighborhoods through conventional macroeconomic assumptions and city scale. In this study, we emphasize on the concept of community and using local potentials in Risk Management as well as successful implementation of community-based planning. This study focused on managing the risk of crisis and analytical framework for the social aspect of resiliency. This study aimed to identify the components of the theoretical and practical community-based, while using the theoretical framework of this approach to reduce the impact of natural hazards in urban areas is possible. Most of the time the local communities are the first victims of natural diseases. So, attempt should be made for its empowerment. Therefore, this research presented a model in order to assess the relationship between resiliency social capital components and disaster risk management components. So we conceptualized resiliency social dimension model in four levels: personal, group, organizational and network, in a local community. In each level two concepts of risk perception and needed skills were studied separately. In personal layer, altruism, participation and cooperation, trust, religious beliefs and values, and community dependency are considered. In group layer, forming and managing of emergency reaction of volunteer group and in organization layer, local institute performances are considered. In fourth and last layer, we studied the concept of local social network and analyzed it through neighbors, friends, relatives, basij, mosques and religious community networks. Finally by designing, spreading and gathering four kinds of questionnaires in one of local community of Tehran: district 20, required data for quantitative analysis was provided. District 20 was selected because of its old religious contexts, strong neighborhood relations, low income, and weak constructions. Research methodology is based on descriptive, analytical and correlation methods while using literature studies, questionnaires and interviews. The results show that there are a meaningful relation between social capital in local community and disaster risk management in different layers. This finding is an important issue in the field of risk management which can be seen as a useful strategy for urban managers. At the end of this research, based on our findings and experiences, we provide future studies with specific suggestions.