Land Suitability Evaluation in Order to Urban Development with Spatial Planning Approach

Urban sustainable development is a form of urban development that can be continued without causing any destruction to resources and systems that depends on it. Increasing trend of urban population and growth of cities necessitates the attention to how control the development of the cities with program and move along the principles of sustainable development. In fact, appropriate urban Sustainable development will be realized when the land to be used in appropriate with its capabilities.
The aim of this Research is evaluating the Land Suitability of Ahvaz city for urban development.. This study in terms of goal is an applied one and in terms of research method is descriptive – analytical one . Firstly the appropriate layers have been normalized in ARC GIS environment and considering that the nature of the research is decision-making and selection of suitable lands, Multi-criteria decision-making methods were used. Thus 15 considered Criteria were completed by using Fuzzy Dematel technique questionnaire by 15 members of the experts of spatial planning and urban planning field and the weights of criteria was calculated in Excel software, then the calculated weights was multiplied to each layers. Finally, the TOPSIS technique was implemented in ARCGIS and the layers were overlapped together and prioritization map has been presented for urban development in Ahwaz County. The area of priorities is given as follows: the first priority is 54975 Hectare, the Second priority is 250168 Hectare, The third priority 75367 Hectare, the fourth priority 44658 Hectare, and Fifth priority is 3642 Hectare.The first priority is located in southern parts, the southwest and northeastern and more of its area is in the wastelands.