Prioritization of Human-Centric and Sustainable City Criteria by Proportional Spherical Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process

Human-centric and sustainable cities have become one of the most popular research areas today. They are based on a holistic approach that aims to both improve people’s quality of life and ensure environmental sustainability. The weighting of numerous tangible and intangible criteria used in the performance evaluation of these cities has emerged as an important problem. The symmetrical representation of vague and imprecise data using fuzzy set theory is an absolute necessity for a successful weighting process. In this study, symmetrical representation of especially intangible criteria is carried out with proportional spherical fuzzy sets. Proportional spherical fuzzy sets provide significant convenience to the expert in determining the membership, non-membership and hesitancy degrees and ensure that the assigned values are more accurate and consistent. In the study, five main human centric and sustainable city (HCSC) criteria and 26 HCSC sub-criteria determined from the literature were weighted. In addition, criteria weights were obtained by classical spherical fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for comparison purpose. The first four most important HCSC criteria were determined as water management and conservation, employment/unemployment rate, carbon emission reduction strategies and economic sustainability, respectively.