Spatial analysis of urban environments for locating neighborhood parks (Case study: Maragheh city)

The quality of urban green space and its distribution is one of the important factors in urban sustainable development. Appropriate distribution and accessibility of urban green space are the requirements of new urbanism. The city of Maragheh is one of the middle cities of East Azerbaijan province in which the distribution of urban green space is inappropriate. Accordingly, in this study, with the aim of helping to optimize the green space of this city, a method for analyzing the existing land-uses and locating neighborhood parks has been presented. In this process, the criteria including land priorities, access to secondary and main arteries, proximity to educational and cultural centers, avoidance of inconsistent uses, centrality to the neighborhood, and appropriate distance from existing parks were considered as factors of assessment. In this order, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and TOPSIS, and fuzzy theory have been used in the GIS software environment. The results show that 13.3% of Maragheh city are completely compatible with the construction of neighborhood parks and 6% are completely incompatible. The results also show the high efficiency of the proposed method in analyzing land uses and selecting suitable areas for park development in neighboring units.