Analysis a City Skyline Using GIS (Case study: Hamadan City)

City skyline is reflecting a city’s image and identity in terms of its spatial, historical, social, cultural and economic structures over time. Skylines are the outline or silhouette of a building or number of buildings or other objects seen against the sky, and their importance for the landscape has made them a significant step to human civilization. The mentalities, diversity, and cultures in a city can often be perceived from its skyline. Hamadan’s iconic skyline forms an essential part of the character and appearance of this mega city, so much so that Hamadan’s strong silhouette is instantly recognizable; it is an invaluable asset that is important to protect. The need to cope with rapid population growth under the constraint of limited amounts of developable lands has resulted in a concentrated development of high-rises. So Hamadan’s skyline has changed dramatically over the last decade. For those who focus on the esthetic qualities of cities, the analysis of the skyline is not a recent phenomenon. GIS technology has been used for mapping, analyzing and evaluating urban development for the past three decades. However, skyline analysis has not usually been available among functions in current Geographic Information System (GIS) functionality. This article investigates the esthetic qualities of urban skyline and its transformation due to high-rises construction. The objective of this research is to evaluate the city skyline. The study makes use of the GIS technology and its 3-dimensional (3D) modeling functions and also Goldstein laws to construct, assess, and analyze the city skyline. Research data from GIS and questionnaire analysis, internal and external effective factors are presented in SWOT table.