Locating mosques in Rasht city using GIS and AHP method (Case study: Rasht District)

Mosque, as an important and effective element in Islamic cities, has always been considered as a public space for various and comprehensive functions. It also plays vital role in the social, economic, political, and physical life. In order that a mosque can play its multidimensional role in the development of the social and cultural life of Muslims, special attention needs to be paid on its establishment in the urban context and all the standards and principles for locating should be applied.
This paper is applied in terms of objective and descriptive-analytical in terms of the nature and methodology. Relying on documentary and field studies, it aims to measure the mosques locating criteria and determine an appropriate place for construction of new mosques in District 2 of Rasht based on the main and secondary criteria. This paper used GIS and AHP to perform quantitative and qualitative calculations. For this purpose, it first prioritizes these factors based on research literature and results of previous studies. In the next step, they were weighted using the expert choice software, which is a strong tool for multi-criteria decision making based on the AHP method.
Results shows that among the main criteria, the religious criteria played more significant role compared to urban and population criteria and between 10 subset, easy access and proximity to other uses had higher importance. Finally, by considering the overlap of GIS maps, the appropriate points for the construction of future mosques in the considered area in this research were provided.