Investigation of Factors Influencing the Physical Resilience of Rural Settlements After Flood Events (Study Case: Borujerd County).

Understanding the issues and challenges of rural areas and providing logical solutions for them is one of the fundamental steps towards sustainable rural development. Nowadays, rural areas face numerous problems and obstacles, with the risk of floods being one of them. To mitigate the effects of this event, a resilience approach has been proposed. The aim of the research is to elucidate the physical resilience of housing in rural areas, focusing on flood risk, using structural equation modeling. This study is practical in terms of its objective and descriptive-analytical in nature, based on field surveys. The structure of housing resilience is reduced to 5 components: spatial resilience, legal resilience, structural resilience, functional resilience, and mental imagery resilience, using 33 indicators in a quantitative Likert spectrum. After initial exploratory studies, 9 villages with the highest vulnerability to floods in the county were identified and examined as case studies. These villages had 2590 residential units in the year 1401, with 127 units determined as samples using the Cochran formula. The research tool was completed with the help of household heads residing in these villages, resulting in a questionnaire reliability of 0.812. The results indicate that the measured reliability of each of the five measurement models on housing resilience and the second-order five-factor model for examining housing resilience were acceptable. In conclusion, the structural resilience index had the highest impact at 0.69, followed by legal resilience at 0.49, spatial resilience at 0.44, functional resilience at 0.32, and mental imagery resilience with the least impact at 0.26 on housing resilience. Additionally, the obtained influence coefficient between housing resilience and the flood variable is -0.78, indicating a strong indirect relationship between floods and housing resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]