Abstract
In Urban Planning (UP), it is necessary to take under serious consideration the inhibitors of the spread of a settlement in a specific direction. This means that all those parameters for which serious problems may arise in the future should be considered. Among these parameters are geo-hazards, such as floods, landslides, mud movement, etc. This study deals with UP taking into account the possibility of widespread flooding in settlement expansion areas. There is a large flooding history in Greece, which is accompanied by a significant number of disasters in different types of land use/land cover, with a large financial cost of compensation and/or rehabilitation. The study area is the drainage basin of Erasinos River in the Attica Region, where many and frequent flood events have been recorded. The main goal of this study is to determine the flood susceptibility of the study area, taking into account possible factors that are decisive in flood occurrence. Furthermore, the flood susceptibility is also determined, taking into account the scenarios of precipitation and the urban sprawl scenario in the area of reference. The study of flood events uses the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model and the urban sprawl model SLEUTH, which calibrates historical urban growth, using open and cost-free data and software. Eventually, flood susceptibility maps were overlaid with future urban areas to find the vulnerable areas. Following, three scenarios of flood susceptibility with the corresponding susceptibility maps and vulnerability maps, which measure the flood susceptibility of the current and future urban space of the study area, are presented. The results have shown significant peaks in the moderate class of flood susceptibility, while, in the third scenario, high values of flood susceptibility seem to appear. The proposed methodology and specifically the output maps can serve as a decision support tool to assist urban planners and hazard managers in making informed decisions towards sustainable urban planning.
Highlights
Among the most severe natural disasters are floods
Noteworthy is the large increase observed in the case of urban sprawl, mainly in the moderate category of flood susceptibility and the occurrence of 8 km2 versus 0.6 km2 in the high category of flood susceptibility of the current situation
Compared to the rest of Attica, it is distinguished by the preservation of traditional land uses the development of animal husbandry and agriculture
Summary
Among the most severe natural disasters are floods. Their effects have a direct impact on people, infrastructure, and the natural environment in general. The quantification of flood risk results either in monetary units or loss of life units, if the losses are measurable, or in qualitative terms in the case of intangible damages (social, environmental, cultural) to the affected areas. The likelihood of flooding has increased in many areas due to social and morphological changes, such as land-use change due to urban sprawl. Flood risk is increased due to climate change, severe weather conditions (heavy rainfall), and river discharge conditions [5]
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