Providing a Spatial Index to Evaluate Deteriorated Urban Textures by Geographical Information System and Multi-criteria Decision Making

Abstract

The phenomenon of urbanism has caused cities to adopt a new spatial arrangement, and old and deteriorated urban textures receive fewer attention than before. This lack of attention brings several socio-economic and environmental issues for these textures, and makes them to convert to deteriorated urban textures. Therefore, today detecting deteriorated urban texture is the primary step for modern planning. Proposing an integrated spatial index is the novelty of the research to determine the level of deteriorated urban texture in a study area. Indeed, this index consists of a set of spatial criteria such as graining, age of building, and permeability, that are calculated through geographical information systems. Among these criteria, permeability needs more notice in modeling compared to previous works. Thus, in this research accessibility, street crossing, and traffic indicators are utilized to evaluate permeability efficiently. In the next step, these criteria are combined based on the experts opinion and with the help of multi-criteria decision making to create an integrated spatial index. Finally, to show the results of this index, the values for deterioration have been illustrated in 5 classes from very low to very high deterioration at neighborhood scale of Tehran's 7th region. Comparison of the index results with the reference data, ameliorated activities, and field surveys shows the high verification of the proposed index.

Keywords

• deteriorated urban texture
• permeability
• geographic information system (gis)
• multi-criteria decision making
• analytical hierarchy process