Ecological indices in evaluation of urban development capability (case study: Tehran metropolitan area)

According to a World Bank report, the urban growth rate is increasing more than the rate of population growth throughout the world. Such an urban growth rate may cause environmental crises on different levels (global, national and local) if there is a failure to consider ecological factors. It is obvious that development of metropolises such as Tehran is also impossible without considering some master plan which defines the appropriate urban development planes based on ecological criteria.

It seems that land suitability indicators based on ecological criteria may provide a suitable basis for urban planning purposes in order to identify a better solution and prevent environmental crisis. Multi-criteria assessment is required to find the suitable ecological criteria for evaluating urban development potential, therefore a multi-criteria decision making approach using GIS techniques was employed during present research to find appropriate ecological criteria. Besides that and due to inherent uncertainty governing the decision making process as well as the incompatibility of different judgments made by various decision makers, we were encouraged to use fuzzy logic to eliminate ambiguity of decisions in this research.

During the present study the necessary factors were extracted through a literature review and the Delphi Technique, and were entered into a GIS database. Information layers were combined using weights derived from Delphi Techniques and the ultimate decision was made based on the two Boolean and Fuzzy Logic using ARC GIS 10.1.

Final results revealed that there is no more room for horizontal development in the City of Tehran