Large-Scale Park Site Selection for Urban Centers Using Three-Stage Analytic Hierarchy/Network Process Case Study: the Region 8 of Shiraz Metropolitan Area

The central area of any cities is of critical importance in the process of urban sustainable development. Diversity of land uses is an inevitable characteristic of a lively and dynamic urban center. These various land uses should support each other and need to be located in appropriate locations. In urban centers with different activities, public green spaces underpin urban sustainability and increase quality of life. In fact, nowadays there is an increased need for qualified and well-located public green spaces, in particular parks, in these areas. Therefore, green space site planning is amongst the most important of all management decisions for environmental and urban planners in a city. Reliable site planning is indispensable to the decision-making processes involved in developing urban green spaces supporting sustainable development. If making the decision reflects on a rationale based on proper information and research, then a higher level of community satisfaction is expected. In fact, if an appropriate site is selected based on a comprehensive integrated approach which considers all feasible effects, most of citizens' aspirations will be fulfilled. However, the multi-criteria nature of site selection for such spaces makes this issue so much complicated that it cannot be resolved using conventional managerial methods and tools. Considering the multidimensional structure (like social, economic, environmental, ecological or planning dimensions) and multi-functionality ( (such as utilization, employment, preservation, etc.) of green spaces, green space site planning is a decision under a variety of factors and can be viewed as a multiple criteria decision-making ( (MCDM) problem. Therefore, with reference to the use of multi-criteria decision-making process for urban green space optimum site planning along with a more sustainable development path, a very important role is played by the Analytic Hierarchy Process ( (AHP) and by its generalization to feedback networks, the Analytic Network Process ( (ANP). In addition to AHP and ANP approaches, which are both comprehensive to harmonize and deal with different aspects of sustainable urban green space site planning, GIS is also best suited for handling a wide range of criteria data at multi-spatial, multi-temporal and multi-scale from different sources for a multi-criteria analysis. Finally, from the viewpoint of all the above approaches and their benefits, this article studies the development of urban green spaces in the central area of Shiraz metropolitan area, Iran based on a comparison of different sites by developing a decision support system using a three-stage procedure based on integrated GIS Analytic/Hierarchy Process. Moreover, in order to select the alternatives, the methods of analytical hierarchy process and analytic network process have been comparatively studied. The results indicate that the models would yield the same output; however, the analytic network process works more on efficiently for this purpose. Overall, empirical findings indicate that the research approach can be used for future sustainable development in establishing standard decision-making procedures in urban green planning and management. Therefore, urban planners and managers can use this research result for choosing a more comprehensive mathematical tool for complex decision and rational judgment around the selection of land use location choices.Keywords: Green space, Site planning, Multi-criteria decision-making, Shiraz