الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 142 |  |  |
| | | from | 142 | | |
Abstract
Urban areas are dynamic phenomena that experience continued development, which is generally motivated by a wide range of physical and socioeconomic driving forces. Urban development is usually associated with changing patterns of land use/land cover, which in turn has significant impacts environmental quality in urban areas. Such altering environmental consequences may have considerable implications on the quality of urban and sustainability of urban areas. Thus, the importance of the urban sustainability assessment process is due to its role in understanding the effects of the urbanization process, providing a mechanism for determining the negative effects of the urbanization process, monitoring, and measuring the success of the urban development process. To that end, a set of tools have been developed to assess and analyze urban sustainability. Urban sustainability refers simply to keeping consumption rate of natural resources and the consequent pollution levels within the limits that not overwhelm the environment’s ability to provide resources to humans and other members of the ecosystem. Accordingly, the rapid unplanned development of urban areas will have adverse impacts on environment and its natural resources. Urban sustainability has many dimensions that must be taken into account during measuring urban sustainability.
The overall objective of this study is to assess environmental sustainability of urban areas through a composite index reflecting different aspects of urban sustainability. Such an assessment can support decision making process, managing urban areas properly and attaining their sustainability.
The thesis has six chapters, where the first chapter provides background for the study highlighting the research problem, thesis objectives, methodology and structure. Meanwhile, the second chapter presents a theoretical background about urban sustainability and different framework for assessing urban sustainability. Thereafter, the third chapter presents the description of the study area including physical setting, administrative setup, demographic conditions, and land use /land cover pattern with particular emphasis on main urban centers, some details of problems faced in the area. This is followed by the fourth chapter that explains the suggested methodology for measuring the sustainability of urban centers in the study area. The fifth chapter is dedicated to present the results of applying the suggested framework for assessing sustainability of urban areas highlighting variations in sustainable level of urban centers in the study area. Finally, the sixth chapter provides a conclusion of the thesis in addition to a set of recommendations.
The composite suitability index is a relative index, which means that it is mainly intended to highlight variations in the level of sustainability among various urban centers. This implies that the index value of each urban center reflects the relative degree of sustainability compared to other urban centers. The assessment framework can also be used to measure the efficiency of development projects of urban areas, as it can be relied u.