SOLVING SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AND VALUING TOURISTIC POTENTIAL USING GIS-BASED TECHNOLOGY STUDY CASE: BIOUGRA CITY, MOROCCO

Abstract

In the last 2 decades, Morocco has known rapid growth of urban transformation followed by significant Population growth, which causes serious environmental problems related to water pollution and scarcity, and social with the deficiencies of infrastructures. And this has been witnessed in the city of Biougra which requires taking serious steps and adopting new projects to solve these issues as soon as possible. And as a reflection of that, this paper takes advantage of Geographic information system (GIS) coupled tools in the first place to locate future sites for building new schools using weighted overlay analysis approach, to improve the education system. And in the second place to choose potential sites for implementing new wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) by adopting multicriteria analysis (MCA). Finally, as a part of saving cultural heritage, and improving the social and economic situation for local citizens, we aim to value cooperative of this region as a replacement of poor touristic quality in the city, by making a track of the existing cooperative and profit from 3d modeling as a part of providing the traveler the best possible guide to reach these points of interest and also develop a desktop application for editing and manipulating different types of file related to cooperatives. This study showed successful results by localizing a new site to build a school in the northeastern of the city, and a match between the found site for WWTP and the existing station but with giving a possibility for expansion.