Evaluating Urban Environmental Quality; Case Study: Districts 2 and 3 of Maragheh City

Asadi, Fatemeh; Mobaraki, Omid; Sami, Ebrahim

doi:10.22034/aaud.2023.391530.2774

Evaluating Urban Environmental Quality; Case Study: Districts 2 and 3 of Maragheh City

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Fatemeh Asadi ¹

Omid Mobaraki ²

Ebrahim Sami ³

¹ M.A. in Geography and Urban Planning, Faculty of Humanities, Maragheh University, Maragheh, Iran.

² Associate Professor of Geography and Urban Planning, Faculty of Human Sciences, Maragheh University, Maragheh, Iran (Corresponding Author).

³ Assistant Professor of Geography and Urban Planning, Faculty of Human Sciences, Maragheh University, Maragheh, Iran.

10.22034/aaud.2023.391530.2774

Abstract

The increasing social-cultural, economic, physical, and environmental problems across the world in the second half of the 20th century which are caused by the accelerating urbanism growth and the failure to present an inclusive plan have degraded the quality of the urban environment in cities, particularly in developing nations. For this reason, urban environmental quality has been a topic of interest in human and environmental studies over the past years. Quality is evaluated not just by the objective environment but also by people’s perception of the environment to which they belong. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the urban environmental quality of Districts 2 and 3 of Maragheh City, Azerbaijan, Iran. The study fell under applied research and used a descriptive-analytical method. The components under study were social, economic, functional-physical, and environmental components, which were analyzed by the SPSS software, a one-sample T-test, stepwise regression, and one-way ANOVA. Findings showed that in all studied components, the mean quality of the urban environment was less than a value of 3 in both districts. The review and comparison of the means of all environmental quality indexes in both districts revealed that District 3 of Maragheh City experienced better environmental quality indexes than District 2. Also, multiple regression results showed that the social index (β=0.404) and the economic index (β=0.311) had the highest and the lowest impacts on the environmental quality of the city’s Districts 2 and 3, respectively. This study is the first work undertaken to investigate the quality of the urban environment from all dimensions, particularly from a subjective dimension.

Keywords

Evaluation

Urban Environment

Social and Economic Components

Physical and Environmental Components

Maragheh City

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