Best living neighbourhood in the city : a GIS based multi criteria evaluation of ArRiyadh City

Abstract: ArRiyadh city is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. It hosts almost five million people from different parts of the world and different parts of the country. The city is facing heavy migration pressure therefore the living conditions in the different parts of the city are different. The inhabitants are concerned about their mobility and accessibility to different civic services. Therefore living area selection in the city becomes an important subject because living area affects a person physically, economically and emotionally. This study illustrates the use of Geographic Information System to assess the accessibility to six basic civic services including health care, educational, emergency response in the form of firefighting & ambulance, public parks and shopping centers from different parts of the city and Multi-Criteria Evaluation framework to aggregate the accessibility of these services to find the best area(s) for living in the city. The study defines the “Best” areas as the areas that have easiest accessibility to all these services. Service areas for each service have been calculated using road network and these service areas are converted to raster to aggregate them into a single dataset using weighted linear addition method. The single raster is classified into five classes including, best, good, acceptable, bad and worst using the natural breaks classification scheme. It has been found that this approach of using network based analysis with Multi-Criteria Evaluation is very useful for selecting a neighborhood for living for the residents and for planners this approach provides an opportunity to find the planning gaps and evaluation of the availability of civic services to the citizens.