Urban Resilience as Lived Experience: A Structural Evaluation of Residential Satisfaction in Post-Earthquake İzmit

Residential satisfaction serves as a critical metric for lived resilience, reflecting the sustained functionality of sociospatial systems. However, its long-term evolution in post-disaster, rapidly urbanizing landscapes remains under-researched. This study evaluates sociospatial dynamics in İzmit, Turkey, nearly three decades after the 1999 İzmit Earthquake, analyzing how urbanization trajectories shape resilience outcomes. Grounded in a bottom-up spillover model, the research utilizes a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) framework to analyze resident survey data, complemented by a spatial “sections-based” analysis to capture intraurban variability across distinct development processes. Social capital emerged as the strongest predictor of residential satisfaction, potentially acting as a compensatory mechanism in deprived neighborhoods, despite physical deficiencies. Findings revealed profound sociospatial heterogeneity in long-term urban recovery. Paradoxically, contemporary mass housing exhibited lower satisfaction scores than older informal developments, challenging the assumption that formal planning and modern construction inherently guarantee sustained resilience. By utilizing residential satisfaction to interpret uneven lived resilience across urbanization trajectories, this study advocates for prioritizing the most influential quality domains through targeted interventions. These insights move beyond technical recovery metrics to offer a transferable framework for disaster-prone cities seeking to align institutional planning goals with the actualized residential satisfaction of communities.