Environmental Engineering and Management Journal June 2022, Vol. 21, No. 6, 1059-1074 http://www.eemj.icpm.tuiasi.ro/; http://www.eemj.eu “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iasi, Romania ASSESSMENT OF LAND SUITABILITY FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF PERI-URBAN AREAS IN COIMBATORE USING GIS, AHP AND MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION MAKING Navin Ganesh Vadivelu 1 ∗ , Sathyanarayan Sridhar Ramachandran 2 1 Department of Civil Engineering, PSG Institute of Technology and Applied Research, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India - 641062 2 Department of Civil Engineering, Coimbatore Institute of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India - 641014 Abstract For assisting in the effective utilization of land resources at the regional level, Land Suitability (LS) evaluation can be employed. If proper gauges and implementations are made, then the LS assessment can well be attained, which is useful for credible development. In the Land-Use (LU) analysis, a powerful means for taking care of spatial data is the Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Whilst attempting to assign comparative significance to the numerous criteria pondered in a suitability evaluation, this tool's application can't singly trounce the scarcity of the opinions’ constancy offered by experts. The aim of the presented research study is the assessment of LS for Sustainable Development (SD) of Peri-Urban (PU) areas of Coimbatore city, in Tamil Nadu, India. For resolving the issue of individually using the GIS tool, this analysis uses the combination of GIS, Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), along with Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). Here, the mandatory aspects function as a key for a long SD, and the requirement for ecological planning was highlighted. Additionally, to envisage the LS of the Coimbatore PU area for SD utilizing weighted overlay analysis by means of integrating ‘7’ thematic layers, geo-visualization technology was implemented. The presented study’s result implies that only 49.80% and 31.86% of the area are highly suitable for Urban Development (UD) in the future. Key words: Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), Geographical Information System (GIS), Land Suitability assessment, peri-urban, sustainable development Received: December, 2021; Revised final: March, 2022; Accepted: April, 2022; Published in final edited form: June, 2022 1. Introduction The swift rise in population has created several difficulties for attaining SD these days (Navin Ganesh et al., 2020). The populace is raised because of uncontrolled migration from agricultural areas to the developed areas in several countries. Intense pressure is exerted on social, economic, together with ecological parameters (Short Gianotti et al., 2016). The urban, and also PU, are drawing more attention and interest targeting resilience together with sustainability. The habitability in these regions to satisfy the Minimum Quality of Life (MQoL) is changing. Several changes in designing, planning, ∗ Author to whom all correspondence should be addressed: e-mail: navinganesh@psgitech.ac.in along with economic approach have to be implemented, which will be a hard task for the planning along with management team to achieve this development (De Guimarães et al., 2020). A suitable area must be found for further development or evaluation of LS for urban LU planning, overcoming undesirable urban growth and defending the environment around cities becomes significant (Ullah and Mansourian, 2015). The land has a sensibly stable or expected cyclic activity that is a part of the earth's surface. Its suitability for agriculture, settlement, and industry relies upon its elements. In recent centuries these elements were exhausted (Memarbashi et al., 2017). A