Development of an Urban Public Service Site Selection Tool Using Spatial Group Decision Making and Geo-Social Network (Case Study: Site Selection of Shopping Centers)

Site selection, as one of the key principles of urban planning, plays an important role and has a huge impact on the development of urban progression and citizen satisfaction. Urban site selection is a public process that will certainly create the most satisfaction with the views of citizens, experts, specialists and managers of the relevant fields. The purpose of the urban site selection is to determine the best possible site for an urban facility within a specific region. Site selection has a significant impact on the success or failure of a project. Especially in developing countries, public urban service centers failure is caused by the unsuitable site of the service. One of the main reasons for this challenge is related to the approach of decision making which is usually based on the experts’ knowledge. In this regard, the application of spatial group decision-making methods by means of the geo-social network can be effective in promoting urban development and site selection of public services. The purpose of this study is to develop an algorithm for site selection of public services centers via geo-social network platform in a case of shopping centers in the district six of city of Tehran. Also, the proposed approach attempted to integrate the opinions of different gropes of stakeholders including managers, experts and especially the citizens of the case study region. Initially, after examining the characteristics of urban land use in the study area and using environmental parameters, related factors were identified and evaluated. Then, the relevant spatial information was collected and make them ready for use in the system. Major criteria include: population, traffic congestion, slope, land value, accessibility. Accessibility criteria includs sub-criteria for a distance from business centers, distance from tourist centers, distance from main roads, distance from public transportation centers, and distance from parking lots. The software development environment is the Telegram social network with a different graphical user interface for collecting different opinions and showing the results. The decision-making process is carried out in tow steps. First, the weighting process is done with Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) by all the groups of stakeholders, and then we utilized the fuzzy majority for the integration of achievements in the first step. To assess this decision-making scenario, the statistical society was considered to be about 50 people (15 experts, 10 managers and 25 citizens of the region).
The results showed that in group decisions, the dispersion of selected options and their compliance with the criteria is more appropriate, but in individual decision making, users tend to pay more attention to one or two criteria. The results of the final decision of distribution were not fair. Expert's satisfaction from the result of the group decision making is 85% while in individual decision making it is decreased to 60%. Also, geo-social spatial group decision making is one of the most important tools available to urban planners and allows site selection for various public utility centers. The designed methodology demonstrated the efficiency of geo-social networks for solving the urban public services site selection problem.