Analysis of Flood Risk Areas and Investigation of Urban Flood Resilience in Denizli City

Cities are witnessing various urban water problems due to reasons such as sudden and high-intensity rainfalls that occur in a short time due to climate change, urban planning policies that are not sensitive to the climate, and inadequate urban drainage systems. There are various approaches to overcome or adapt to these problems. In this context, the study is based on the hypothesis that urban land use decisions should be developed based on the idea of “resilience” against risks related to climate change, and that risk analysis should be performed first for this purpose. In the study, a search was conducted in the Web of Science (WOS) database in order to determine the analysis methods related to flood risk and their relations with spatial planning decisions, and the bibliometric data of the obtained publications were taken as basis. In this context, keyword analysis was performed on the studies filtered with the “urban flood resistance” scan in the VosViewer 1.6.20.0 program and their methods were examined. The flood risk map of Denizli city was created using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which was determined to be the most used method. The risk map has 4 classes indicating “low, medium, high and very high” risk areas. As a result of the analysis, it has been determined that very high - risk areas are located in the south and southwest of the city, in areas close to the river and in areas with little or sparse vegetation. The obtained risk map was superimposed with the 1/25.000 scale master development plan of Denizli city and the spatial plan decisions taken in very high risk areas were evaluated. In this context, it has been determined that the areas with flood risk in the plan largely include urban settlements (Current housing areas, Development housing areas) and working areas (Trade area, Trade+Residential area, Trade+Tourism+Residential area). In this context, strategies regarding flood resilience in the urban planning perspective have been developed based on the example of Denizli city.