DETERMINING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF DIFFERENT INDICATORS IN IDENTIFYING INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS USING THE MEMBERSHIP FUNCTION

Abstract. Informal settlement is one of the most common forms of urbanization, increasing every day all over the world, especially in developing countries. One of the important topics informal settlements studies is the measurement of indicators that can identify these settlements effectively. In many articles, the authors use various indicators to identify these areas. In addition, the literature shows these areas are suffering from several problems including the occurrence of fire due to the use of informal electricity, poor access to urban facilities and services such as fire stations, and dead-end and narrow alleys, isolated from other developed areas. Therefore, low accessibility and morphology of the transport network make fire suppression a very hard task in these areas. As such, in this study, we investigated the effectiveness of spatial and space syntax theory indicators in informal settlement mapping. For this purpose, we used ArcGIS and DepthMap software. The study area is District 19 in the southwestern part of Tehran in Iran, which includes 18 neighborhoods. The results show the connectivity index with 16% error or in other words, 84% correctness can be a good index or map to detect informal settlements, and the most prominent feature of informal settlements is the poor accessibility.