A Quantitative and Qualitative Investigation of Urban Parks Using Fuzzy AHP

Today, technological transition and industrialization of cities has led to an important and essential change in urban ecology which created undesirable impact on human societies. One of the most important and the simplest ways is development of parks and urban green spaces to reduce the different impacts of environmental vulnerabilities. The distribution of urban green space has a high importance in cities. Since there are not appropriate models for site selection of urban land uses to determine the regions, capacities from environmental view point; the present study attempts to investigate the distribution of urban green space in the city of Sari the political center of Mazandaran province. The city has an area of 28.52 km2 with a population of 261293. Also the city is covered by 374904 m2 green space and 113385 m2 public parks. Evidences show that the existed urban green space has not distributed in a hierarchical order; the urban park and green space per capita are 0.39m2 and 2m2 respectively which indicates obvious difference with the given standard (9m2) of the country. This research aimed to investigate quantitative and qualitative dispersion of urban parks to select the appropriate locations for the neighborhood parks using an integrated AHP fuzzy in GIS environment. So, first the effective parameters and criteria for urban park selection were identified and then the data base of these criteria was created in GIS. Second, a questionnaire was completed by the professional experts to rank the preferences of the criteria; the weight of each criterion was obtained using FAHP and the informational-descriptive layers of criteria were integrated in GIS with respect to the calculated weights and analytical functions. Finally, the desirability map was produced by overlaying the informational layers and accordance to the existed land uses for the different parts of the city which are categorized in three classes: highly appropriate, appropriate and inappropriate. The results revealed that 18.8 percent of the city area is highly appropriated, 33.7 percent is appropriate and 47.8 percent placed as inappropriate areas which have limitations for establishing neighborhood