Within the scope of this project, a method is proposed to determine the steps to be taken in order to make urban areas more "resilient" than their pre-disaster situation (by identifying and reducing damage and losses that may occur in possible earthquakes before earthquakes). With the main objective of urban seismic resilience, probabilistic and deterministic seismic hazard analyzes will be made based on active seismic sources and regional ground velocity models in the Türkoğlu region of Kahramanmaraş province, which has been selected as the pilot region, within the scope of this study, and numerical simulations of possible ground motions and intensity distributions in scenario earthquakes will be made. will be calculated with Then, the building stock characteristics in the region will be determined on-site, and different vulnerability information will be obtained for different building classes. Accordingly, structural damage distributions likely to occur during scenario earthquakes in the urban area will be calculated. Finally, the locations of faults, ground structure, seismic hazard, possible ground motion and felt intensity in scenario earthquakes, possible damage to the building stock will be included as input parameters in the urban resilience criterion to be developed within the scope of the project. The spatial seismic effect that will emerge as a result of the evaluation of these parameters within the pilot settlement area to be studied will differ according to the structure of the area. According to this differentiation, besides the possible structural damages in the existing settlement, the effects on various land uses may produce different results.

Kahramanmaraş province Türkoğlu region, which is proposed as the project pilot area, is basically under the influence of the Eastern Anatolia and Dead Sea active fault zones (ÖDFZ). The study area is one of the most critical regions of our country, which is defined as a seismic gap in terms of seismic hazard, since large-scale earthquakes do not occur in the region, especially in the instrumental period, and long-term energy accumulation on the relevant faults increases the probability of earthquakes.

The method to be developed in this project and to be applied in Kahramanmaraş Türkoğlu region, which has a high seismic hazard, can be used for any region with a similar earthquake risk in our country or in the world.

The project team includes faculty members and scholars from Middle East Technical University Department of Civil Engineering, Earthquake Studies, and City and Regional Planning departments, Hacettepe University Değartment of Civil Engineering, Kahramanmaraş Sütçü İmam University Geological Engineering Department and Eskişehir Technical University İki Eylül Campus Earth and Space Sciences Institute.

Figure 1. Approximate locations of earthquakes in the historical earthquake catalogs in the study area and its immediate surroundings. Earthquake locations Ambraseys (1989), Soysal et al. (1981), Guidoboni and Comastri (2005).

Figure 2. P&T – Resilience in 3D Analytical Framework (Adapted from Béné et al., 2012, p.31 into Turkish.)