Delineation of environmentally sustainable urban settlement using GIS-based MIF and AHP techniques

Abstract

Choosing appropriate locations for built-up growth while maintaining natural balance has become necessary for sustainable urban planning. To this end, two multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches—the multi-influencing factor (MIF) and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP)—have been applied in this work. The MIF model results show that 23.546% of the study region was very highly suitable for newly built-up areas, and 18.786% was restricted for urban settlement, whereas, in the AHP model, 28.907% of the area was highly suitable, 17.619% was restricted for urban settlement. Finally, the dependability and efficiency of the two models used for the study area were assessed through the receiver operating curve (ROC) and area under curve (AUC) analysis. The comparative analysis demonstrates that the MIF approach (AUC 0.817) is more suitable and reliable than the AHP (AUC 0.783). The present work provides new insights to integrate GIS tools with MCDM for practical urban land suitability assessment.

Keywords:

• Urban settlement
• land suitability
• environmental sustainability
• GIS
• multi influencing factor (MIF)
• analytical hierarchy process (AHP)

Acknowledgments

The authors extend their appreciation to Abdullah Alrushaid, Chair for Earth Science Remote Sensing Research, for funding. The authors are thankful to the editors and potential reviewers.

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Author contributions

Nitin Liladhar Rane: Conceptualization, Idea of a topic, Formal Analysis, Data Interpretations, Methodology, Software, results and analysis, Creation and Interactive visualization of figures and methodology chart, writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing; Saurabh Purushottam Choudhary: Methodology; writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing; Arjun Saha: Investigation; Formal Analysis; Writing – review & editing; Aman Srivastava: Formal Analysis, Methodology, Creation and Interactive Visualization of Figures, Writing – review & editing; Chaitanya Baliram Pande: Conceptualization, Formal Analysis, writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing; Fahad Alshehri: Conceptualization, Formal Analysis, Validation; Okan Mert Katipoğlu and Ranjan Roy: Conceptualization, Formal Analysis and Validation; Hazem Ghassan Abdo: writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.