The purpose of this research is to analyze tourism competitiveness in middle-east countries by using travel and tourism competitiveness index published in the report of the world economic forum. The used model is performed to analyze Promethee model and comparative analysis on the basis of data in 2015 and 2017. The analysis results showed that although Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon and yamen improved their situation in comparison to 2015, they couldn’t improve their own competition power in comparison to other middle-east countries, and they were located in the group of countries with lower tourism competitiveness.

The municipal zone 9 in Tehran is highly vulnerable to earthquake owing to possessing a highly weathered residential fabric, proximity to North Tehran Fault, and existing industrial usages. In order to take preventive measures and reduce the damages caused by earthquake, it sounds essential to designate the vulnerable areas and make the required arrangements. In this connection, the present study aims at avaluating the vulnerability of urban buildings in zone 9 of Tehran to various earthquake intensities. For this purpose, 10 effective factors on vulnerability of the aforesaid zone were employed under weighting and fuzzification against earthquake, adopting Analitical Network Process (ANP) - Fuzzy planning models. The selected layers in GIS environment were composed and finally, the generalized vulnerability mapping for the zone was prepared. To predict the damage caused to the urban buildings, the earthquake scenarios in the modified Mercalli intensities of 6, 7, and 8 were developed and implemented on the generalized vulnerability mapping of the zone. Ultimately, the vulnerability degrees of the buildings were grouped into five categories of very low, low, average, high, and very high based on the obtained results. The results of this research indicated that the vulnerability degrees of the urban buildings in the abovesaid range of were respectively 26, 56, 17, 1, and 0% for an earthquake with modified Mercalli intensity of 6, and 21, 10, 52, 16, and 1% for an earthquake with modified Mercalli intensity of 7, and 7, 4, 10, 61, and 18% for an earthquake with modified Mercalli intensity of 8. The results of this research are useful in understanding the capability of GIS spatial anlysis for vulnerability mapping.The information provided by these maps could help citizens, planners and engineers to reduce losses caused by existing and future erthquick by means of prevention, mitigation, and avoidance.

Lake Urmia, one of the world’s largest salt lakes, is rapidly losing water and drying up. This environmental hazard has raised concerns about the consequences and impact on the surrounding communities. In this paper, we use a futuristic view (horizon of 10 years based on medium-term planning) to identify the main environmental drivers in the surrounding settlements of the Urmia Lake basin. A qualitative method, based on cross-impact analysis, was used as a means of future research. We also used a Delphi-based expert panel method to collect data and extract the environmental impacts of Urmia Lake. After the three rounds of the Delphi process, the expert panel reached a high level of agreement (100%) on the top 17 environmental consequences. Then, these consequences were classified by driving force and dependency using the MICMAC method. The results show that reducing pasture area, soil and water salinity, groundwater decline and depletion, and destruction of surrounding agricultural lands play a significant role in environmental change in Urmia Lake. Overall, any small change in these variables may lead to fundamental changes in the entire system.

The earthquake is one of the most devastating natural hazards that most of the Iranian cities. District 9 of Tehran will be vulnerable due to old residential texture, proximity to North Tehran fault and industrial land use in case of earthquake. Therefore, reducing the vulnerability to this natural disaster is one of the main goals of this study. In the present research, to evaluate vulnerability due to earthquake hazard, 10 indices are studied as effective factors in cities buildings vulnerability. These factors are selected on the basis of indices in previous studies. Indices involving materials type, type of facade building density, the age of building, the number of floors, ground area of buildings, compatibility of adjacent users, distance from the fault, geology formation and width of passageways are analyzed by using computational method of ANP scored by experts. The criteria weight is applied in effective layers in vulnerability. At last, by integrating the layers in GIS environments, general vulnerability map is extracted in the area. In order to evaluate the buildings vulnerability against earthquake, data obtained and from ANP analysis were made fuzzy. Finally, vulnerability map in district 9 of Tehran against earthquake was extracted. The research results show that if earthquake occurs, in district 9 of Tehran, 19.46% and 10.69% of buildings respectively have trivial and low vulnerability, while 50.29 percent of buildings have medium vulnerability. Also, 17.62% and 1.91% of building have high and very high vulnerability respectively, or they are completely damaged.

The overall objective of this study was to investigate urban infill development policies as a good solution to counteract urban sprawl and protect the peri-urban area of Ardabil in Northwestern Iran. In this context, we used a mixed methodology (two quantitative methods). Landsat imagery, including a patchy Landsat ETM+ for the year 2000 and a Landsat 8 for the year 2020, was used to map and assess land use to investigate sprawl and land-use change, and ArcGIS was used to investigate the potential for infill development in this city. The results show that between 2000 and 2020, 967 hectares of peri-urban land was lost to urban expansion. CA-Markov projections also showed that 452 hectares will be lost by 2030. The assessment of the city’s internal capacity for infill development showed that more than 999 hectares of land within the city are suitable to support this strategy and provide the land needed for urban expansion over the next decade. Finally, the study of the city’s master plan, which applies to all Iranian cities, discovered that there is a lack of adequate outlook regarding the amount of land available for future urban development, leading to misuse of urban land and urban sprawl in Iranian cities, suggesting that an infill development strategy could be a good way to address this issue.

Urban security is of great importance, especially in public spaces like parks, which are considered a place for relaxation, comfort, and recreation. Various crimes occur in such places due to problems such as lack of supervision, large numbers of people, and reduced lighting, which increase the number of defenseless and private places. To analyze the security status of public parks, this study employed geographic information systems (GIS)‐based spatial analysis of crimes in the Tehran metropolis, the capital of Iran. The study includes twenty-four crimes occurring in forty-one parks in Tehran in 2015. Required information was collected by contacting the police department and the weight of each index was determined using an analytical network process. To rank the parks, the PROMETHEE model was applied and graphical statistical methods were used in a GIS environment to detect and display the spatial pattern of crimes. The results of the analysis show that crime is low in central, northern, and southern parts of the city, whereas it is high in the western and eastern parts of Tehran. In addition, there is a significant positive relationship between two variables such as area and park ranks in terms of security. It is essential to detect the place conditions resulting in crime opportunities or simplify it by relying on geographic science principles. Results of this research are of great importance for several organizations in Tehran, such as the Municipality of Tehran, police department, justice system, and other relevant organizations to increase safety in parks and for the development of GIScience in the context of crime analysis.