GIS-based land-use suitability analysis for urban agriculture development based on pollution distributions

Abstract

With recent increases in urban population and development, agricultural lands have been changed to residential areas and industrial settlements. Such urban population growth increases necessitate emerging relatively new strategies and forms in urban parks and landscape designs to meet today's economic, social, and ecological needs toward sustainable development. Urban agriculture is one of the strategies for achieving sustainable development and creating multi-purpose landscapes. Such an approach appears to partially solve the problem of agricultural land reduction and degradation. However, urban pollutants seem to hinder the development of such a sustainable concept in the cities. This research aimed to identify suitable locations for urban agriculture in urban green spaces according to various contamination criteria and the uniform distribution of the green spaces in Mashhad, Iran. In this research, using an Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and a Geographic Information System (GIS) facilitated the decision-making process. It also determined the importance of the land use criteria for urban agricultural development. The results showed that the most suitable areas for urban agricultural development with the least impact of pollutants in Mashhad were the suburbs, especially in the northeast and southeast parts. These research results have practical implications for planning urban agricultural development at the city level across the world.