Measuring the attractiveness of a city block

Sammanfattning: Nowadays the competition between cities is something very common, especially between cities of different countries. But this competition it can be observed even between cities of the same country or between districts of the same city. Based on this phenomenon municipalities try to change and become more sustainable (socially and environmentally), implement more green spaces in their urban core, create vibrant local environments and launch campaigns in order to create liveable districts, improve their local economy and survive this growing competition. In other words, cities want to become more attractive.In Sweden cities are also part of this global trend and since they are growing economically they try to create an urban environment that is desirable for its citizens. In Stockholm’s Översiktsplan there are different main goals, such as “The growing city (växande stad)” which is analyzed as “An attractive big city” or “Good public spaces (God offentlig miljö)” which is analyzed as “Mixed use urban space”, “Inviting public space”, “Living local centers” leading to the question how do these correlate and how do they affect each other.The reason of this research is to understand what is an attractive area in a city and find out a way to measure attractiveness by using spatial or non-spatial factors who play a major role on how a city is perceived. It is known based on existing research and literature, that many different factors are involved for a place to be considered as attractive, such as the distance from the means of transport, the distance to public amenities, house affordability, vibrant lifestyle, the distance from market places, social equality, the distance from the city center, the proximity to nature and many others, but there is no index that uses all these factors and calculates an attractiveness score.So this research aims in the creation of an attractiveness index, by formulating a lot of different indicators (social, geographic, economic, etc) based on the Översiktsplan goals and the calculation of attractiveness of different areas in Stockholm. The areas are SoFo District in Södermalm, Skarpnäck suburb in the south and Tensta suburb in the north. The main goal of this research is to improve the urban quality in Stockholm by identifying problematic areas, in order to increase the awareness about urban quality and the way to accomplish this research is the use of Multi-Criteria Evaluation in collaboration with Geographic Information Systems.Based on all the above the research question in this thesis will be: How city’s block attractiveness is measured with the use of Multi-Criteria Evaluation and the implementation of Geographic Information Systems?