Development of a framework for measuring attractiveness of Cities and Urban Areas

Urbanization has been a top trend in the recent history of mankind. Besides the tremendous increase in the world population, urban influx has adversely affected the balance of resource consumption. In this age of communication, cities and urban areas compete with each other to attract more people towards them in order to create more opportunities. Sustainable tourism as well as better living becomes to decisive factors. Therefore, development of a comprehensive framework to evaluate attractiveness of cities and urban areas is needed to rate the cities. The phenomena of attractiveness of cities are based on multi criteria analysis of diverse factors that affects attractiveness. Namely the aesthetics, Environmental Comfort, Social Structure and economic stability. A model is developed and validated through incorporating inputs from surveys and opinions of expert stakeholders. Attractiveness is a very complex as well as multi criteria phenomena therefore, a Multi criteria analysis tools was used in analyze the data. A general format frame work was created based on the literature review. Pairwise comparisons of different components, factors and sub factors from the hierarchy were done through different type of surveys. The feedback of the respondents was analyzed and relative priorities were calculated in the form of weights given to the components by the respondents.