Decision-makers' spatial reasoning for rural tourism building siting

In the 20th century, human movements with recreational potential to rural areas are growing and coinciding with the urban sprawl, especially many man-made constructions' cluttering. This paper presents a systematic spatial regional planning approach that utilizes a structured multi-criteria decision analysis framework to evaluate rural tourism buildings into their landscape, with an empirical case study, La Vera, Extremadura ( Spain). Intelligent spatial siting for decision-makers' reasoning can capitalize on the multiple benefits of practical actions and can achieve various resource management objectives more efficiently. The focus of the study first determines the evaluation criteria and sub-criteria based on European planning policy and regional planning law on Extremadura (LESOTEX, Law 15/2001 of land and landscape planning of Extremadura) and the relevant literature review. Then, an expert group discussion is achieved to validate the criteria weights more objective. Evaluation criteria identify a spatial data treatment with a grading system based on constraints, tourism resource, environmental and socio-economic aspects. The proposed methodology herein uses the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) functions of multi-criteria decision modeling evaluating the entire study region using a common grading scale in a GIS environment. The main goal of the preliminary results, therefore, is to show this methodology's flexibility as exploring different decision alternatives and patterns. In addition, the study results demonstrate that the approach is not to find a single suitable solution as the final decision, but to explain the decision-making process.