Ranking Sustainability of Urban Districts through Factor and Cluster Analyses, Case Study: Municipal Districts of Isfahan

The rapid rate of population growth in developing countries leads to imbalances development in various urban levels. The trend of urban sustainability is declined due to these imbalances. This declination increases concerns of urban planners to improve the sustainability of urban environments. Being aware of sustainability level of urban intervention areas before doing any action is inevitable. For this reason, there are a lot of interests for application of ranking techniques for recognition and analysis of problems before planning. In this paper, the factor and cluster analyses were applied to rank municipal districts of Isfahan in terms of sustainability. At first, indicators for measurement of sustainability were reviewed. After that, according to the data availability criterion, 21 indicators which could be classified in social, economical, physical and infrastructural dimensions were selected. Finally, the study area, factor and cluster analysis techniques were introduced, and the selected indicators were summarized through application of the SPSS software. The result of the factor analysis was reduction of 21 indicators in 5 factors which described 77% of variance. Then, scores of factors and rank of municipal districts were calculated. Rank of municipal districts was determined through calculation of the Compound Index. Finally, the cluster analysis putted on the factors achieved from the factor analysis. The result of clustering was classifying municipal districts in the most sustainable, relative sustainable and the most unsustainable districts. Outputs of the models showed that the 5th, 6th and 3th districts are the most sustainable; the 1th, 2th, 8th and 7th districts are relative sustainable, and 4th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th districts are the most unsustainable districts of city of Isfahan.