Identifying urban zonal preferences: planners' perspective

Abstract

Residential location preferences depend on diversified sets of physical, social and economic parameters with highly non-linear interconnections. Factors governing residential location preferences may broadly be grouped as sociocultural, socio-economic, socio-demographic, spatial and geographical. Each of these factors incorporates a wide range of parameters that characterise residential location preference to a varying degree of significance, such as monthly household income, family size, religion, cost and so on. Estimating rapid, yet accurate, residential location requires identification of the most significant factors governing preference. Thus, a concept of extracting significant parameters and identifying their importance is carried out using the analytical hierarchy process introduced herein. Further, the most preferred zone to live is identified using the technique of order preference by similarity to ideal solution from urban planners' perspective. The study area is from the most potential developing country of the world: India. A novel application of the multi-criteria decision-making technique to residential location preferences, a complex problem in urban planning, is presented.