Identification of Potential Sites for Housing Development Using GIS Based Multi-Criteria Evaluation in Dire Dawa City, Ethiopia

Site suitability analysis for specific project is the preliminary tasks in context of modern urban land use planning and development. However, site analysis by its nature is the complex process and involves consideration of multi-criteria decision making limited not only to physical condition of urban land-uses, but more attention should be given to integrate socio-economic and environmental factors. GIS based Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) provides a wide range of powerful tools capable to transforms, combines sophisticated geographical data with value judgments among conflicting criteria along with sets of alternatives. The present study modeled suitable building sites for housing development in Dire Dawa City. Eleven factors such as land-use/land-covers, built-up, slope, flood sheets, road, aspect, airport, railway, soil, population density and proximity to urban center were evaluated and prioritized as per judgment of urban planning experts. The influencing weights among factors has been computed using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in IDRISI 32 software. The overall Consistency Ratio (CR) of the module was 0.08 % and fulfilled the tolerable threshold (CR ? 0.10). Finally, the Weighted Linear Combination (WLC) function of ArcGIS model builder has been applied to generate suitability map. The finding of the study revealed that, about 5.4