Analyzing the Environmental Sustainability of Hamedan City Neighborhoods Based on the Comparison of Multi-criteria Decision-making Methods and Residents' Views

The sustainability of the environment and the quality of the urban environment is one of the issues that have received the attention of researchers because it is seriously related to the residents’ lives. The purpose of this research is to evaluate and prioritize environmental sustainability in the urban areas of Hamadan. First, eight neighborhoods were selected by cluster sampling and then by simple random sampling, the households living in these neighborhoods were selected as subjects. The sample size using Cochran's method was equal to 368 people. The instrument for measuring environmental sustainability included 12 criteria and 71 items. Data analysis was done using SPSS and GIS software. The 12 main criteria were used for the environmental sustainability of localities. The level of attention and importance of the sub-criteria was determined according to the residents' questionnaire. Using AHP and ANP methods, the importance of the criteria was determined and based on that criteria, quality of place, annoyance caused by traffic volume, environmental challenges, and protective measures of water consumption were considered the four important criteria. According to the analysis of the T single-sample, it was found that the indicators of water consumption protection measures, satisfaction with the mobility and accessibility index, annoyance caused by the volume of traffic, dissatisfaction with noise, and environmental challenges in Hamedan city are not favorable. Hamedan neighborhood sustainability map was prepared based on the criteria used, AHP and ANP methods, and GIS analysis. Findings revealed that Hamadan City is not very stable in terms of sustainability. The results also demonstrated that by using both methods, stable and unstable neighborhoods are the same (in some cases, there is a difference in rank), which shows that Hamadan city is not very stable in terms of sustainability, because the distance between stable and unstable neighborhoods is large. Eram Boulevard and Eram Bostan neighborhoods had the highest stability while Qalani and Chaparkhaneh neighborhoods had the lowest stability.