Journal of Urban Planning and Development

Technological and industrial developmental project activities disturb the natural ecosystem and have multiple direct and indirect environmental consequences. The disposal of waste material, being a prominent activity that accompanies any industrial development, is a problem of ever-increasing concern. Therefore it is of immense importance to establish appropriate sites for waste disposal facilities such as landfills. To select an appropriate landfill site with minimal environmental damage, an environmental impact assessment (EIA) is necessary. Available methods to carry out an EIA are insufficient for cumulative assessment and inappropriate to make the final decision regarding the selection of a landfilling site, nor do they take uncertainty and future impacts into account. The present work implements fuzzy logic, which takes uncertainty into account in assessing the environmental impact of landfill siting and considers future impacts in terms of frequency of occurrence. A new approach that considers numeric values of the weights in terms of fuzzy membership is examined, the potential applicability of the method is tested, and results are compared with those of other common existing methods.

Iran is a disaster-prone country. A rapid rate of population growth, overurbanization, and environmental degradation have led to increasing risk to and vulnerability of structures and settlements. No significant and effective policy has, however, been developed to mitigate disaster risks in the country. During the last decade of the twentieth century, which was declared the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), extensive efforts were made at various levels to tackle this problem. In this article the activities of the decade in Iran will be reviewed, analyzed, and evaluated against certain criteria. A proposed structure for natural disaster management has been designed that is expected to improve conditions and overcome some of the existing problems and shortcomings. This plan is considered the most significant product of the IDNDR activities in Iran.

In the present study, we revised and expanded the basic model proposed in our previous study to better deal with equity issues in highway investment planning. The issues cover horizontal (intraregional) and vertical (interregional) equity of the accessibility or travel cost for cities as well as the equity of budget allocation among the cities. In this study, more constraints and decision variables were added to the model to handle the exclusive and complementary properties among alternatives. In addition, adjustments for travel cost measures and objective functions are proposed to justify the horizontal and vertical equity. The revised multiobjective model is estimated by fuzzy programming for the highway system in Taiwan. Our results indicate that the model is practical and effective for acquiring reasonable solutions for the goal of efficiency and equity in highway investment planning.