Analyzing and Comprising the Location of SIX Universities in Tehran Using Geospatial Information Systems

Universities as the places of training the experts play an essential role in social, economic and cultural structure of the nations. The quality of education and the educational space are two major effective factors on the quality of training the students. Since the educational places are of the most important land-uses in the cities, the compatibility of them with other surrounded land-uses is vitally important in urban planning. In many cases the adjacency of educational places with incompatible land-uses such as military and industrial or locating in polluted areas or avoiding from necessary utilities have caused falling the learning abilities of the their students. In this research the desirability of the location of six universities of Tehran namely: K.N.Toosi university of technology, Iran university of science and Technology, Amirkabir university of technology, university of Tehran school of engineering, Shahid Rajaee University and Allameh Tabatabachr('39')i university has been evaluated and compared using the spatial analyzes in Geospatial Information System. To find the major criteria (factors), many students in those universities were asked. Based on the responses, the criteria were classified into two categories of physical and environmental. Satellite images, maps and census data were used to produce criteria maps. Evaluating and comprising between the criteria were done based on the idea of more than 500 students. Each of considered factors is extracted from a corresponding factor map and this is the point that highlights the role of GIS. For environmental factor three maps were produced and then combined. Greenness map in this study is a map showing the NDVI index of Tehran. To produce this map, image of Landsat 7 satellite, ETM+ sensor, band 3 and 4 was used as the input. ENVI software was used for this process and NDVI obtained within a thousand meters radius around each university. For the other map processes in this study ArcGIS 10.3 software was used. Next, three factor maps were combined using Index overlay method with the equal weights and environmental index map was created. Air pollution is at the highest level in winter. Noise pollution is significantly higher in the mornings. Real greenness is better observable in summer when all the trees have leaves. Different time of gathering will not affect the results because the relative conditions of the target universities are fairly constant during the process of collecting data. To prepare physical index map, accessibility and compatibility of surrounded land-uses must be determined.  Accessibility was extracted from a 1:2000 map of Tehran using OD-cost matrix in ArcGIS software. To generate compatibility, land-uses around the target universities were determined and their compatibility with university land-use was compared pair-wisely. The compatibilities expressed in five levels. Levels of compatibility have then been assigned different weight based on previous studies. Once the values of factors obtained, they were be combined to get the final index. However, the weights of each criterion must be assigned. AHP as a multicriteria decision making method and ratio estimation method were used for this task. At last, the final index for desirability of the location of target universities achieved by combining sub-criteria. The results of this research revealed that the location of Amirkabir University achieved the more desirability of location. After that K.N.Toosi, university of science and technology, university of Tehran school of engineering, Shahid Rajaee university and finally Allameh Tabatabachr('39')I stand on the next ranks.