Abstract:
Studies and research on land suitability for the
localization of economic and industrial activities in cities are
attracting academics and local policies concerned with urban
planning and organization in order to make urban areas more
accommodating. The current paper aims to demonstrate the
ability of visualization and simulation techniques to assist
planners in preserving urban real estate by combining the Delphi
method with one of the multi-criteria hierarchical analysis
decision-making techniques. The city of Bordj Bouarreridj in
Algeria was chosen as the case study and, with the participation
of experts, a set of criteria were adopted to determine land
suitability. Three criteria were selected in the first phase with the
use of the Delphi method. In the second phase, we applied the
Analytical Hierarchy Process (AH, a hierarchical analysis
method. During the third stage, the obtained results were
translated into the GIS program to derive the spatial suitability
map. The following are among the most important achieved
results: 13.38% (521.793 km2
) of the area was regarded to be of
high suitability, 67.54% (2,634.758 km2
), achieved moderate
suitability, 12.94% (504,794 km2
) attained low suitability, and
6.14% (239,685 km2
) were found to be not suitable at all.
