A fuzzy approach for assessment of smart socio-cultural attributes of a historic urban landscape: Case study of Alwar walled city in India

Abstract

Smartness is a vague concept with different meanings for different people. It is imperative to harness the latent potential of existing settlements for an inclusive smart urban development. The study aims to assess the socio-cultural attributes of an Indian historic urban landscape with a thriving residential culture. Since data collection of neighborhood-level urban communities is not feasible in India, a structured questionnaire was used to conduct household surveys. Such real-world phenomena have inherent imprecision and ambiguity associated with human judgments. Therefore, the survey items are assumed as fuzzy linguistic variables, and the raw dataset is transformed into triangular fuzzy numbers. Fuzzy arithmetic and weighted averaging operators are applied for the hierarchical evaluation of indicators and variables. A robust algorithm is used for the dimension reduction of a fuzzy coded dataset while dealing with subjective responses. The aggregated fuzzy scores show an overall better performance of traditional communities with respect to their socio-cultural attributes, such as a sense of safety and collective efficacy. The application of fuzzy logic in urban planning and allied behavioral studies can effectively and pragmatically deal with the inherent uncertainties in a humanistic system. Future researchers may explore fuzzy multi-criteria evaluation approaches for ordinal scale datasets.