Urban Sprawl and Assessment of Urban Livability (Case Study: Diwaniyah Urban Areas, Iraq)

Subject Areas :

Haider Karim Badr Al-Murshidi ¹ , Mirnajaf Mousavi ² , Ayoub Manouchehri ³ , Alireza Jamshidi ⁴

1 - PhD Student in Land Use Planning, Department of Geography, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Urmia, Iran
2 - Professor, Department of Geography, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Urmia University, Urmia, Iran
3 - Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Urmia University, Urmia, Iran
4 - Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Urmia University, Urmia, Iran

Received: 2024-08-21 Accepted : 2024-10-15 Published : 2024-12-21

Keywords: Urban sprawl, livability, remote sensing, support vector machine, Diwaniyah, Iraq,

Abstract :

Population growth in urban areas is a direct factor affecting physical development and urban sprawl. On the other hand, currently, the most dominant type of urban growth in the world, especially among developing countries (Iraq), is horizontal (sprawl) growth, which causes problems and issues in the field of urban sustainability and ultimately the well-being and quality of life of the citizens. Building livable cities has been an important goal for new urbanization in Iraq. Therefore, understanding residents' satisfaction with urban livability and its determinants is useful for urban planning and policy-making regarding the construction of livable cities. Based on what has been said, the main goal of the present study, which is an applied and descriptive analysis method, is to explain the relationship between urban sprawl and livability in the city of Diwaniyah, Iraq. Therefore, to achieve the desired goal (investigating urban sprawl), a supervised machine learning algorithm using a support vector machine (SVM) was used. Also, using the researcher-made questionnaire tool, urban livability was investigated among 12 selected neighborhoods of the city of Diwaniyah. The study sample consisted of 386 people selected through stratified random sampling. The results showed that Al-Asri neighborhoods with an average rank of 3.16, Al-Jumhuri Al-Sharqi with an average rank of 3.22, Al-Karamah with an average rank of 3.44, and Al-Wahda with an average rank of 3.64 are at a higher level than the other studied neighborhoods. Also, Al-Khadhra neighborhoods with an average rank of 2.28, Al-Salam with an average rank of 2.58, and Al-Sadeq Al-Thani with an average rank of 2.62 are at the lowest level in terms of urban livability.

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