Most suitable school location selection analysis using analytical hierarchy process and earthquake risk map: Elaziğ central example

Nowadays, students spend most of their times at school. Safely healthy and reachable school areas effect positive to students attitudes and behaviors. Education areas has to be located conveniently and has to be good planned for efficient education process, being coutious of the natural disasters and using country's resources effectively. On January 24 2020, an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8 occurred in the Sivrice district of Elazığ, and two earthquakes with a magnitude of 7.7 and 7.6 occurred in the Pazarcık and Elbistan districts of Kahramanmaraş at 04:17 and 13:24 on 6 February 2023. As a result of these earthquakes affecting the province of Elazig, it was determined that many educational institutions were heavily damaged and a decision was made for demolition.They are demolished and started rebulding process. This rebuilding process has to be done on the most suitable areas. Being renovate of this school areas are done with the regulation, reports and determined criteria in most of the countries. With this study, it is aimed to determine the most suitable school areas as a result of the criteria used by the developed countries and also with our countrys legislation. For this purpose, Elazığ Province Central district was chosen as the study area and 15 suitable criteria were determined. İn addition, multi -criteria decision making methods and geographic information systems have been researched in the literature. AHP which is one of the multi-criteria decision making methods is used for determinig the suitable school areas. Criteria maps which is taker from geographic information systems have been analyzed and conformity maps have been determined. The most suitable school areas were determined on the basis of these suitability maps and also currently available school areas were evaluated. In addition, due to the seismicity of the region, the Maximum Ground Acceleration (EBYİ) values were used to observe on the most suitable location selection