Investigating livability of residential sectors using TOPSIS model and GIS a case study: South Malta neighborhood in Duhok City, Iraq.

Providing housing units with livability and suitable facilities that can be an appropriate shelter for citizens is one of the main concerns of planners and officials. The problems of lack of access to standard and viable housing units in Iraq that faced major social and economic crises, war and terrorism, are more tangible. This paper tries to examine this problem by comparative, descriptive, field, questionnaire, and laboratory methods. For this purpose, 154 residential units, which are located in 17 residential sectors of south Malta neighborhood in Duhok city were evaluated, and some criteria considered in the present study includes 1-the quality of the buildings, 2-garbage and specks of dirt and stagnant waters, 3-lighting of the passages, 4-smoke and dust, 5-crowd and traffic and voice, 6-having yard or balcony or good landscape or green area, 7-animals and insects, bad odors, 8-access to transport networks. The main aim of this paper is to reveal the disproportion and uniformity of residential sectors and inappropriate residential sectors of Malta neighborhoods using TOPSIS. The Order Performance technique by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) model was ArcGIS were used for analysis and assessment. Shannon entropy was used for weighting criteria which showed that the Smoke and dust, animals and insects, and bad odors had the highest importance in analysis with a weight of 0.178, and 0.168 respectively. The residential unit with number 30 was the best and the most viable building with the highest Ci score (0.361). Residential unit 64 with a Ci of 0.150 was the least appropriate. In general, the west and northwest buildings of the Malta Neighborhood were more suitable for living in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]