Using geospatial analysis to determine livability in Najaf city by GWR

Center of Urban and Regional Planning for Postgraduate, University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq

^* Corresponding author: dr.mustafa.a.jalil@iurp.uobaghdad.edu.iq

Abstract

Iraqi cities suffer from degradation in many livable elements, sometimes related to an economic situation, social, and environmental, therefore in this research we have applied some indicators relating to livable city by using GIS technique, to determine the trend of Iraqi city in livability term.Also we are cannot depend on any foreign standards, because we did not have enough archive to our cities to explaining it is trends, so in other side the relationships between activities in the city did not have enough exploring depending on complexity model to clarify the connections among these activities and how it depends on livability of cities.We try applying GWR, on socio-economic factors, to study which effective factors on city livability. In this research we select Najaf city as a case study, for its importance as international religious tourism city, and for its stability through last decades, which has helped growth in economic activities, and made it attractive to immigrations.From discussing in literature review we determine some indicators, and finally we found the difficult point that determining Iraqi city trends in terms of livability was incomplete, because it is have a physical structure in many parts of it.