DETERMINATION OF ECOLOGICALLY SUITABLE SETTLEMENT AREAS BY USING GIS BASED MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION MAKING ANALYSIS: THE CASE OF NIGDE PROVINCE

Due to the increase in the world's population, urbanization is swiftly increasing. With the increase in the urbanization, the ecological construction of the cities degenerates over time. In this context, sustainable urban planning methods that use various methods depending on the developing technology in order to preserve the ecological structure of the cities are being developed. One of these approaches is the combination of remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), which is one of the multi-criteria decision-making methods, to identify the settlement areas that are ecologically appropriate. It has been published in many studies that it was possible to obtain healthy results for the determination of ecologically appropriate settlement areas by collectively using these methods. In this context, the purpose of the study is to evaluate the urban development areas of Nigde city in terms of ecological criteria and to present suggestions for sustainable urban development areas taking ecological criteria into consideration. At the end of the analyzes performed with the use of GIS and AHP methods, it was determined that 9.45% of the research area (745.62 ha) was suitable for the 1st-degree ecological settlement. In conclusion, it is prominent to take into consideration the natural environmental factors of the region when planning new settlements in terms of sustainable and ecological urban planning, based on the urban development.