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Instrumental to the concept of sustainability must be the search for feasible ways to implement sustainability, especially connecting heritage and tourism. This should be understood in relationship with the persistence in time and the current and future conception of the human-made environment. This study deals with the spatial characterization over time of the urban sprawl close to and around two important archaeological areas: Kom el Shoqafa, Egypt and Shush, Iran. For both of the investigated sites, change detection analyses have been conducted using satellite declassified Corona and multidate Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery available for free from the USGS Earth Explorer. The study involves the collection of Corona 1964, Landsat TM 1984, Landsat ETM+ 1998 and L8 2016. The past and current urban and agricultural areas have been extracted by using consolidated classification techniques. Analyses and quantification of the spatial dimension of the urban expansion showed that, for both the study sites, urban areas have expanded to a significant percentage. In particular, the analysis of Corona and Landsat TM, ETM+, L8 imagery in Kom el Shoqafa revealed that, for the urban area, the evaluation of the change detection presented generally increasing chronology in both of the study areas, but for the agriculture lands, we can see that the changes sometimes decreased and sometimes increased. As a whole, outputs from our investigations clearly highlight that the current availability free of charge of long term satellite time series provides an excellent low cost tool for several applications including environmental monitoring and change detection to observe and quantify urban and land use changes from a global down to a local scale. We examine the capabilities of integrating remote sensing and GIS and suggest some innovative solutions to preserve the archaeological sites.

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As many developing countries, Iranian and Egyptian cities are growing in population and physically expanding at a high rate. The uncontrolled scattered construction causes loss of orchards, agricultural lands as well as spatial chaos, traffic congestion and increasing costs of municipal services. As a consequence, this also induces a loss of identity and social characteristics of neighborhoods, poor quality of life and degradation of natural landscapes, etc. To face with these issues, it is important to quantify trend and the rate of land cover conversion in order to support plan for a rational land use policy. The main purpose of this research is to set up low cost and reliable tools useful for the monitoring of the urban growth. In this paper, multi-temporal satellite data (Landsat TM 1984, Landsat TM 1998 and L8 2016 have been analyzed for investigating and assessing the effects of the urban expansion in Karaj (Iran) and Luxor (Egypt). According to the results obtained from change detection analysis, both of the investigated sites clearly exhibit an increasing trend in urban expansion much more evident in the case of Luxor than Karaj area. The integration between remote sensing and GIS and the joint use of analytical methods for quantitative-qualitative assessment enable the identification of changes and the mapping of new planned and unplanned urban construction. The availability of timely information free available from NASA web site and the data processing herein adopted provide useful information for supporting planning and sustainable developing policies.

Natural hazards such as earthquakes take place around the world and when combined with humans create natural disasters. Earthquakes, a form of natural hazard, have, in recent years, caused damage and destruction in many rural areas due to the lack of sustainability in political, economic, social, physical and operational criteria. Thus, to overcome the damage caused by earthquakes in rural areas, an assessment of sustainability status seems necessary to plan and strengthen in relation to the status of sustainability indicators. Data collection was performed through field methods and questionnaires. To test the hypothesis, T statistical methods, correlation method and F-test were performed using SPSS software (V22.0, IBM Corporation, Armonk, NY, USA). The results of the study showed that villages were at a low and undesirable level for all aspects, except social index in terms of sustainability. Comparisons showed that there was a significant mean difference among villages in terms of sustainability. The multi-criteria decision-making analysis has been considered and applied to a ranking of villages in terms of sustainability against the hazard of earthquakes. Finally, in order to improve the sustainability indicators of villages, some strategies have been presented.

The majority of this research has been situated in the methods of crisp Micmac and Fuzzy Linguistic Micmac as systematic modeling tools under CIA method. In the current study, both Micmac and Fuzzy linguistic Micmac methods are applied and also compared to analyze the interrelationships between the KBUD and affordable housing variables in Tabriz city, Iran. The obtained results and the rankings taken from both crisp Micmac and FL Micmac are almost the same but few cases, which indicates accuracy of the employed methods. This little variation happens due to the using fuzzy values in FL Micmac that is more precise. One of the advantages of the fuzzy linguistic Micmac is its capability in employing heat maps. The heat maps show whether the system's variables has great influence/dependence on each other or has not. In other words, these maps enable the decision maker to look the strength of the system in a glance, from the existing relations between the factors. The other advantageous of the heat maps is, clustering the factors in an optical mode, because the factors with the same range of influence/dependence may have same role in the system. In our analyzed system, despite of being superior of some variables, the strength of the whole system is in the middle and lower.