During recent years various studies have been conducted concerning the trend of urban structure changes, and the decay process in the district of urban neighborhoods. In the present study, the Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) model and some other statistical models have been used in order to provide a susceptibility map of decayed area. In addition, different criteria have been implemented to identify and analyze the decayed area.
According to a review of background literature, the present study takes into account four criteria: i.e. ecological and environmental, economic, social and structural based on specified sub-criteria for the purpose of providing and analyzing the susceptibility map of decayed area. The quality and quantity of the collected information are of pivotal importance in the studies of urban decayed area. The wider the range of parameters related to research the collected spatial and attribute data cover, and the more accurate these data are, the more precise and high-quality the results obtained from the analysis will be naturally. By doing so, the study will provide a better representation of existing real conditions.
The aim of the present study is to assess the susceptibility of decayed area in the city of Bandar Abbas, located in southern Iran. In order to achieve this purpose, five methods (i.e. AHP, Frequency Ratio, Statistical Index (Wi), Weighting Factor (Wf), and Logistic Regression) were applied together with their combination with the Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques.
During the past years, lack of special attention to urban district, particularly old area has resulted in their degradation and inefficiency. Today, identification and determination of their susceptibility is very essential and important for the urban planning of Bandar Abbas for the present and future. On the other hand, the decay of urban district has led to economic recession, creation of social problems, threats to the security of citizens, and its impacts on/transferring to other adjacent district. In order to mitigate the impacts of this phenomenon, scientific assessment of urban areas exposed to the process of decayed area, or those affected by decay is vitally important.
To achieve this, mapping was performed on areas prone to decayed areas; and the effective parameters on the occurrence of decay in the urban district were analyzed using the six mentioned different methods. In order to confirm the results obtained from these six methods and their concordance with the susceptibility map of decayed area, field observations and data collection was performed at 1300 points of the city with dilapidated and abandoned buildings. Afterward, the methods with the most accurate results were determined and selected. Validation shows that the Wf method presents results with the highest degree of precision, compared to the other five methods (i.e. AHP, Frequency Ratio, Statistical Index (Wi), and Logistic Regression).