Integration of information technology and environmental attributes for planning new settlements

Site selection is the most crucial stage throughout the planning process of new settlements, especially in the hot/dry climatic zones. There is, however, a social as well as an economic cost for the success or failure of the site selection. It is a special field of study which requires an environmental quality assessment. This issue attracted considerable planning interests in the last decade. The subject requires both, theoretical generalizations on the nature of components of environmental quality and actual attempts at the elevation of the quality itself. Undoubtedly, an evaluative approach, which establishes the variable attribute dimensions of environmental quality without rigid imposition of constraints on solutions, would enrich the assessment of new settlement locations. The great advances of information technology, the development of relatively cheap hardware and personal computers, encouraged computer applications in planning processes. In this paper, a method, utilizing a standard computer software in the field of information technology, is used to improve the decision making process during the task of planning new development sites. An implementation example to one of the newly developed sites in Egypt, the Sadat City, is also presented in this paper. The site selection process is performed using available data.