Evaluating suitability for sustainable urban growth of Abuja by using MCE and GIS

Abstract

Abuja, the federal capital of Nigeria was created when Lagos failed to function as the Federal Capital due to the resultant urban problems as a result of land availability. Currently, the rate of implementation of the master plan and urban development is outpaced by the rate of urban growth due to urbanization, as a result exerting a lot of strain on the urban facilities of the city which affects the life of the residents. This study is aimed at identifying a suitable site for future sustainable urban growth in Abuja. The study evaluates urban growth policies namely; social equity, compact growth and environmental protection into spatial layers as the framework for multicriteria evaluation using the geographical information system. The spatial layers are the distance to road, distance to the central area, distance to educational facilities, distance to green/open spaces, soil, slope, vegetation, natural features, and pollution sites were evaluated and prioritized as per judgment of relevant experts. The influencing weights among the layers were computed using Analytical Hierarchy Process. The overall Consistency Ratio (CR) of the module was 0.04 and fulfilled the tolerable threshold (i.e., CR ≤ 0.1). The Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) function of ArcGIS model builder has been applied to generate a suitability map. The map clearly presents the areas that are suitable for future sustainable urban development and also areas that are not, reducing the possibility of future disaster.

GIS-Based Multi-Criteria and Multi-Objective Evaluation for Sustainable Land-Use Planning (Case Study: Qaleh Ganj County, Iran) “Landuse Planning Using MCE and Mola”

“…In recent years, spatial planning has increasingly focused on environmental protection issues (Tortora et al 2015;Romano et al 2015;Memarbashi et al 2017). GIS-based MCE provides spatial planners with a support tool for effective land-use planning and management (Shuaibu and Kara 2019). In this research, land suitability has been derived using weighted map overlay techniques (WLC -OWA) based on MCDM using GIS tools, a procedure concluded in seven maps detailing land-use suitability.…”

“…The advantages of the multi-criteria analysis, GIS-based decision support system, including WLC or OWA in spatial and terrestrial planning, were discussed in several studies (Aydi et al 2016;Corona et al 2008;Jamil et al 2018;Kumar and Kumar 2014;Masoodi et al 2016b;Raza et al 2018Romano et al 2015Shuaibu and Kara 2019;Zolekar et al 2015;Zabihi et al 2019).…”

“…For instance, in contrast to Boolean suitability aggregation that assumes a crisp boundary and certainty, WLC and OWA allow trade-offs between criteria by weighting the normalized criteria according to their relative importance (Jiang and Eastman, 2000;Hanssen et al 2018). Several studies demonstrate the potential of the integrated approach in using GIS and MCE (WLC or OWA) for land evaluation (Akbari et al 2019;Bunruamkaew and Murayama 2012;Chivasa et al 2019;Comber et al 2010;Jamil et al 2018;Karimi et al 2020;Motlagh and Sayadi 2015;Masoodi et al 2016b;Zolekar and Bhagat 2015;Zabihi et al 2019;Sumida and Valente 2019;Shuaibu Kara 2019). These studies showed that these approaches provide more accurate results for land suitability than the Boolean classification, also in some studies, WLC was compared to the OWA aggregation method.…”

Identifying the reuse patterns of coal mining subsidence areas: A case‐study of Jixi City (China)

“…Where s represents the suitability value, x i represents the score of index i, w i represents the weight of index i, and n denotes the number of indicators (Ostovari et al, 2019;Shuaibu & Kara, 2019;G. Yang et al, 2013).…”

“…Zhang et al, 2013). The prototype of MCE-GIS was proposed (McHarg, 1969) and developed (Steinitz et al, 1976) by American landscape architects, and since then MCE-GIS has been gradually applied to agriculture (Ostovari et al, 2019), planning (Graymore et al, 2009;Shuaibu & Kara, 2019), environment (Marull et al, 2007), tourism (Šiljeg et al, 2019), and other fields, especially sustainable development evaluation (Craynon et al, 2016) and construction suitability evaluation (Shi et al, 2013) for mining areas.…”