Lessons from Sustainable Urban Planning and Design - Practical Cases

**Chapter 13**

**Abstract**

**1. Introduction**

**239**

*and Shattri Mansor*

Urban Planning Using a Geospatial

Large scale developmental projects firstly require the selection of one or more cities to be developed. In Libya, the selection process is done by selected organizations, which is highly influenced by human judgement that can be inconsiderate of socioeconomic and environmental factors. In this study, we propose an automated selection process, which takes into consideration only the important factors for city (cities) selection. Specifically, a geospatial decision-making tool, free of human bias, is proposed based on the fuzzy overlay (FO) and technique for order

performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) techniques for development projects in Libya. In this work, a dataset of 17 evaluation criteria (GIS factors) across five urban conditioning factors were prepared. The dataset served as input to the FO model to calculate weights (importance) for each criterion. A support vector machine (SVM) classifier was then trained to refine weights from the FO model. TOPSIS was then applied on the refined results to rank the cities for development. Experimental results indicate promising overall accuracy and kappa statistics. Our findings also show that highest and lowest success rates are 0.94 and 0.79, respectively, while highest and lowest prediction rates are 0.884 and 0.673, respectively.

Rapid population growth and urbanization have caused many problems in the implementation of developmental projects in cities. Haphazard infrastructural project execution that includes disregard in prioritizing city (or cities) selection is also a factor hampering sustainable development practices. Development projects that rely on selected organizations, which in turn rely on human judgment, can lead to unrealistic criteria evaluation, causing delays in project execution [1]. However, the fact remains that continued infrastructure development is unavoidable, especially since urban cities constantly need to evolve and grow to keep up with the times [2]. The selection of a city (or a group of cities) is one of the most important steps for sustainable development. The selection criteria must ensure that the city (cities) has high priority for development and is (are) in line with the needs of the local citizens.

**Keywords:** fuzzy overlay, urban development, TOPSIS, Libya

Approach: A Case Study of Libya

*Hossein Mojaddadi Rizeei, Maruwan S.A.B. Amazeeq,*

*Mohammed Oludare Idrees, Alfian Abdul Halin*

*Bahareh Kalantar, Husam A.H. Al-najjar,*
