Urban Spatial Development Patterns Decision Making Using AHP

摘要

The importance of urban form in the quest for sustainable development has been recognized in a number of countries in recent years. It is important to evaluate the spatial development patterns more rationally before making a planning decision. In this paper, we provided planners a qualitative and quantitative approach to choose the appropriate spatial development pattern corresponding to the city features and development objectives. Firstly, we discussed multiple objectives of city development to make systematic comprehensive planning, including land utility efficiency, investment in infrastructure construction, environment conservation, energy consumption, social segregation and satisfying urban traffic. Secondly, we concluded four prevalent spatial development patterns of Chinese cities, including single-centre, poly-centric, linear and leapfrogging development patterns. Thirdly, we presented an approach to analyze the spatial development patterns based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and Delphi methods. Finally, we used the approach to evaluate the four prevalent spatial development patterns to show how this approach works in planning.