Assessing the Spatial Suitability and Adequacy of Emergency Assembly Areas for Urban Disaster Resilience Using GIS and the Best–Worst Method (BWM): The Case of Malatya, Türkiye

The 6 February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes highlighted the importance of emergency assembly areas for disaster response, evacuation safety, and urban resilience in earthquake-prone cities. Although GIS-based multi-criteria decision-making approaches are widely used to assess spatial suitability, relatively few studies integrate suitability, capacity adequacy, and accessibility within a single framework, particularly in cities directly affected by the 2023 earthquakes. This study evaluates emergency assembly areas in Malatya, Türkiye, using an integrated GIS–Best–Worst Method (BWM) framework. Nine criteria—geology, population density, building density, elevation, slope, distance to roads, distance to rivers, distance to fault lines, and distance to buildings—were weighted based on the judgements of 15 experts involved in Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction Plan (İRAP) processes. The BWM results show that geology and distance to fault lines received the highest weights, whereas distance to roads had the lowest weight. The spatial analysis indicates that highly suitable areas are concentrated mainly in the city centre, while several peripheral neighbourhoods are constrained by geological, topographical, and accessibility-related factors. Existing official emergency assembly areas cover only 27.9% of the population and are located in 13 of 88 neighbourhoods. Estimated access times range from 0 to 5 min in central areas to 10–15 min, or beyond effective service coverage, in peripheral neighbourhoods. Although integrating parks and green spaces substantially increases potential capacity, it does not fully eliminate neighbourhood-level inequalities. The findings provide a spatial decision-support framework for emergency planning in earthquake-prone cities.