Prioritizing urban streets in order to make them walkable; A case study of Gaz

One of the main challenges of urbanization in this century is the domination of automobile over urban spaces. Urban spaces that once lay the foundations of citizen’s common life, with the influence of the car on them, lost their constructive role in improving the quality of citizen’s life largely. One of the most important policies that has been considered in recent years to reduce the domination is making urban streets more walkable. Since urban management faces financial, technical, construction constraints, it is very important to prioritize urban streets in order to make them walkable. This paper seeks to fill a methodological gap in the field of prioritizing of making urban streets walkable. This gap is originated from two sources. The first is that in the most recent research, researchers have failed to prioritize streets in order to be more walkable without mental processes. The second is that the indicators used in recent research are not mostly the underpinning indicators. While the indicators such as space syntax indicators or land use service areas can be used as the underpinning indicators, they emphasized on such indicators like furniture, tiles etc. The last is important too but the most important differences between them is that the last one improves walkability while the first one attract the pedestrian movement stream more fundamentally.  The city of Gaz placed in Esfahan province-ShahinShar County is the case study of this paper. Accordingly, in this paper, a multivariate model is provided through the ArcMap software model builder, based on the underpinning indicators of the pedestrian movement stream (space syntax indicators (4 indicators)) and the Urban land uses service areas (9 land uses accessibility indicators), which calculates the space syntax indicators and service areas for the urban streets, Concurrently. Then, by implementing the F'ANP model on the output of the provided model, the weight of the 13 indicators is calculated and by formulating a composite index of prioritizing streets in order to make them more walkable(PIMSW: Priority Index of Making Streets Walkable), GAZ streets are prioritized. The results show that using F’ANP model for each city, a unique walkability model can be suggested based on the each urban context. This article suggests that a comparison between PIMSW models in different cities should be considered in future studies. While most of the previous studies have calculated and considered the indicators that influence walkability of urban streets either with the same weight or by the weights extracted from mental processes, in this paper, according to the city of Gaz, the weight of each indicator is extracted by F'ANP model. Also, The results of the paper show that, unlike most previous studies, which have recognized the integration in the general form as the most correlated indicator in prioritizing urban streets in order to make them more walkable, the connectivity, control and choice indicators in the city of Gaz, respectively, have a higher weight than the integration in prioritizing Gaz streets in order to make them more walkable.