Assessing Environmental Qualities in the City Gateway and Prioritizing Them by Means of the Analysis Network Process

The city gateway is one of most fundamental elements of spatial and physical structure of the city that has special functions and applications. The city gateway links the urban peripheral environment with its internal built environment that is like a domain and, as an urban space, different spatial and functional relationships are constituted in that. The study of urban spaces with their distinguished qualities in terms of dimensions of the scientific and executive foundations in urban planning is of special importance. The environmental qualities of the city gateway have different elements and components and have reciprocal interaction with each other and cannot be directly measured. The interaction of the mentioned elements reveals the intricate nature of the environmental quality of an urban gateway. The present paper is basic in terms of objective and its methodology is based on the mixed- method (quantitative- qualitative) research which specifies the environmental qualities in the space of city gateway and determines the amount of their importance and prioritization. Based on the obtained results, it was revealed that it can be said with 99 percent confidence that the use of term of city entrance is not conceptually correct and it is necessary to use the term of city gateway in the studies related to the urban planning. In the present paper, based on the scientific foundations of subject matter, some elements, norms and expertized measurements have been defined and the results obtained from the specification and determination of importance and prioritization of features of environmental qualities in the process of studies and organization of city gateway include respectively 1- environment, 2- functional, 3- time, 4- cognitive, 5- social, 6- landscape, 7- management, 8- spatial, 9- morphology and single body.