Assessment of urban structure for the Holy City of Al-Najaf in light of sustainability

Abstract EN

The sustainability represents a measure of the efficiency for the urban structure.

Al-Najaf city is one of the most important cities in Iraq in terms of religious and historical issues.

This study tries to assess AL- Najaf Urban structure – as a sample of Iraqi cities- in the light of sustainable to investigate the extent of the application of urban sustainability principles such as how the density of the population distributed across different quarters, the land use and the hierarchy of the roads in the city.

GIS program has been adopted to represent the city and the length of roads.

The results of this study indicate that the AL- Najaf urban spatial structure is inefficient, It contains a lot of faults, the city lacks in the hierarchy of roads and land use, which spread across a large area, the population density distribution is irregular, most densities are farther away from the city center, which leads to long trips and random and irregular in it.