Residential choice from a multiple criteria sustainable perspective

Minimizing travel in the urban environment facilitates the development of sustainable cities. A key aspect is that there is a wide supply of amenities and facilities in the neighbourhoods: if most of the needs of families, goods and services can be covered from the sub-centers of the residential areas, it will be possible to reduce daily intra-urban mobility. The objective of this work is to propose a ranking multicriteria method that facilitates the choice of an ideal residential location in terms of neighbourhood characteristics, especially in the search of sustainable mobility for each family characteristics. One of the main problems in several Multiple Criteria Decision Making methods is the assignment of criteria weights in the aggregation process. The proposed methodology in this paper, Un-weighted TOPSIS (UW-TOPSIS) is able to overcome that problem. In this Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method the relative proximity of each decision alternative to an ideal solution is minimized for the un-known weights of the criteria which are the variables in the corresponding mathematical programming program. Thus, a ranking based on the relative proximity of each alternative to an ideal alternative is obtained without the a priori establishment of the criteria weights. The use of subjective weights in real decision making contexts, where for instance a ranking of alternatives is required, is subject to important criticisms. This could be the case of the ranking of neighbourhoods based on their sustainability.