Sustainability Through Uncertainty Management in Urban Land Suitability Assessment

Abstract

Rapid urbanization imposes significant pressure on land resources and land use structures and leads to many serious socioeconomic and environmental consequences. In contrast, there has been inadequate attention to application of comprehensive studies using environmentally focused urban development approaches. This fact with inaccuracies associated with spatial and nonspatial data layers necessitates adoption of a structured and insightful approach in the assessment procedure. In this article, a geographic information systems–based spatial analysis and an appropriate model for urban land use decision making, combined with uncertainty analyses, are implemented. The assessment draws on the capabilities of multicriteria evaluation, sensitivity analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, and probability classification methods. Results show the usefulness of these methods as an approach to handling uncertainties in land use planning procedure. The method also provides a soft medium to negotiating among different decision makers when they disagree on data accuracy and claim that this may affect the end results, namely, the selected sites. This helps in deciding on the location and quantity for development of new urban areas, because it is possible to find a common denominator that is agreed by all the stakeholders. As results are systematic and reproducible, the approach can be used for other land use planning procedures in order to reduce the negative consequences of imbalanced and controversial land development.