Urban resilience assessment: a best–worst method for component prioritization

Purpose The concept of resilience has attracted increasing attention and concern among the public regarding threats such as climate change, disease outbreaks, natural hazards, terrorism and other risks. This study aims to evaluate and prioritize urban resilience (UR) components using a multi-indicator decision-making method as a new approach. Design/methodology/approach In this study, the best–worst method (BWM), one of the newest weighting methods based on pairwise comparisons, was used to weight resilience assessment components. The BWM method is a powerful tool for multi-criteria decision-making and determination of criterion weight coefficients through fewer pairwise comparisons and higher reliability. Findings Based on the BWM results, institutional resilience factors had the highest level of importance, with a final weight of 0.4085 compared to other indicators. This indicator includes features related to risk reduction planning and experience with previous accidents. The second, third and last levels were related to the economic resilience index (0.2298), social resilience factors (0.2144) and physical resilience factors (0.1473), respectively. Originality/value The results of this study confirm that identifying and prioritizing the dimensions and indicators for UR assessment plays an important role in increasing resilience and informing policy development. Overall, this study shows that the use of comprehensive and prioritized indicators can lead to greater resilience of cities and the development of more effective strategies.