Multi Land Use Approach towards Sustainable Baghdad City: Bab Al-Muatham Garage as a Case Study

Abstract

Baghdad city suffers from random urbanized expansion and highly congested roads. The city environment has been badly affected by its air pollution and low green coverage. Through this paper, a Multi Land Use (MLU) approach is presented to provide areas for commercial and domestic purposes without needing to consume more green coverage of the city and also transform the neighbour land use to one place and change them to green areas. According to the results of this research, it was found that the bus terminals is the best choice for MLU and there are many places in Baghdad available to be MLU. Towards this, satellite images and CAD software have been used to find these terminal places and areas saving possibility. This is done by transforming neighbour land uses to be MLU in one place. These terminals were classified according to their areas into small (less than 10,000 m2), medium (between 10,000 to 40,000 m2) and big (more than 40,000 m2). For terminals of small and medium areas, shopping centres and hotels can be constructed over them, while for the big terminals, student accommodations and flats for domestic purposes can also be built over these terminals, in addition to shopping centres and hotels. As a case study for this research, the Bab Al-Muatham bus terminal was illustrated. The results showed that this bus terminal can be changed to be MLU and can save an area of more than 50,000 m2 through transforming the surrounding land uses to be MLU and change the transformed lands to be green areas.

Remote Sensing-Based Urban Sprawl Modeling Using Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network Markov Chain in Baghdad, Iraq

“…The study area is located between 33 • 19 and 33 • 32 N latitude and 44 • 24 and 44.40 • E longitude, which covers a total area of 7669.69 km 2 . It comes after Tehran as the second largest city in the west part of Asia and after Cairo as the largest Arabic city [38,40]. The elevation and slope in the study area vary from 25 m to 109 m, with an average altitude above the mean sea level and an average slope of 0 • to 89.89 • .…”

“…Most studies only explored previous to present LULC, and no study focused on the future urban land use and its future environment sustainability [24,36,37]. Mohamedmeki et al [38] focused on multiple land use approaches toward sustainable development in Baghdad City in 2017. Qassim et al [39] explored the LULC from 1986 to 2019.…”

“…Baghdad is the capital of Iraq, is one of the oldest cities at more than 1000 years old, and is the center of socioeconomic and political development. Currently, it is the most developed city in the country [38]. The city has faced a fast human population increase since 1950 with a relatively high rate of urban sprawl, mainly due to its rural-urban and external and internal migration as the main sources [42].…”

“…However, 228,000 and 66,000 refugees returned to Baghdad City, and the other 50,000 families moved within Baghdad City [45]. With the political issues, the city lacks development plans, and the accumulation of decades of wars and corruption increases the problems of the city, such as independent urbanization and population increasing trends [38]. Baghdad is an environmentally fragile area due to its small coverage of natural trees and because LUCC might have a large impact on environmental ecosystems [46].…”

“…Baghdad is an environmentally fragile area due to its small coverage of natural trees and because LUCC might have a large impact on environmental ecosystems [46]. All of these difficulties have harmfully impacted the regional environment; thus, Baghdad City needs a sustainable development plan for standard living [38,41].…”