An Evaluation of Urban Environment Quality:A Case Study of Borazjan City Neighborhoods

Urban Environment Quality (UEQ) is directly influenced by environmental, physical, and socio-economic factors. Therefore, this study attempts to assess Borazjan’s UEQ in 2017 by means of 16 indices in four main measures. In this study, two methods of reviewing documents and conducting a survey were used to collect the data. It was sought to evaluate what the UEQ of Borazjan city was and which neighborhoods had the lowest UEQ in 2017. The geographical scope of the study comprises 31 neighborhoods of Borazjan including 22,600 resident households as the study population. Based on Cochran’s method, 380 samples were selected to participate in the study for a city-wide systematic survey. The validity and reliability of the instrument were computed by means of CVR (0.66) and Cronbach’s Alpha (0.86) tests. The goodness of fit, by employing Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, resulted in p-values higher than 0.05 as the level of significance. Following this, the ANP technique was used to weight the factors and measures; next, WIOA and Reclassify techniques in GIS were employed to analyze the results through overlaying. The findings from synthesizing all factors for UEQ indicate that four settlement types, namely, industrial areas and floodway’s surrounding, informal settlements, dilapidated and old neighborhoods, and newly developed neighborhoods have unsuitable and low level of UEQ. Based on the findings of the study, several suggestions have been put forward to improve the UEQ of these neighborhoods.