Analysis of vulnerability assessment frameworks and methodologies in urban areas

The occurrence of major natural disasters in recent years has impacted large cities worldwide and boosted the need of assessing urban resilience. As a key factor of resilience, vulnerability correlates attributes of communities with the level of damage caused by hazards. Although a large amount of studies has reviewed the assessment of vulnerability from the perspective of a particular hazard, the combined analysis involving all kind of hazards and vulnerability dimensions in the urban context is uncommon. This research provides a critical analysis of a selected sample of 72 contributions released from 1998 to 2018 and related to the appraisal of vulnerability, in order to determine their adequacy in the evaluation of urban vulnerability. The findings stemming from this process revealed that the social dimension was a priority, whilst qualitative components associated with risk awareness were slightly covered. Furthermore, multi-criteria decision analysis and weighting allocation were the most widely used techniques to address urban vulnerability, whilst 32 methodologies were bespoke built to be applied to particular locations. Most of the cases examined were oriented to specific hazards, with only 10 of them focused on multiple hazards. Hence, the results suggest the need for developing a new framework applicable to multiple hazards worldwide to bridge the identified gaps.