Landslide initiation and runout susceptibility modeling in the context of hill cutting and rapid urbanization: a combined approach of weights of evidence and spatial multicriteria

Rainfall induced landslides are a common threat to the communities living on dangerous hillslopes in Chittagong Metropolitan Area, Bangladesh. Extreme population pressure, indiscriminate hill cutting, increased precipitation events due to global warming and associated unplanned urbanization in the hills are exaggerating landslide events. The aim of this article is to prepare a scientifically accurate landslide susceptibility map by combining landslide initiation and runout maps. Land cover, slope, soil permeability, surface geology, precipitation, aspect, and distance to hill cut, road cut, drainage and stream network factor maps were selected by conditional independence test. The locations of 56 landslides were collected by field surveying. A weight of evidence(Wo E) method was applied to calculate the positive(presence of landslides) and negative(absence of landslides) factor weights. A combination of analytical hierarchical process(AHP) and fuzzymembership standardization(weighs from 0 to 1) was applied for performing a spatial multi-criteria evaluation. Expert opinion guided the decision rule for AHP. The Flow-R tool that allows modeling landslide runout from the initiation sources was applied. The flow direction was calculated using the modified Holmgren's algorithm. The AHP landslide initiation and runout susceptibility maps were used to prepare a combined landslide susceptibility map. The relative operating characteristic curve was used for model validation purpose. The accuracy of Wo E, AHP, and combined susceptibility map was calculated 96%, 97%, and 98%, respectively.

Enhancing the Efficiency of the Management of Real Estate Companies through Organizational Structures

The article represents research on ways to make the management of real estate companies more efficient, starting from their structural organization. The organizational structure of the enterprise is a basic component of the general structure of the company and reflects the “anatomy of the enterprise” and the way of its conception, detailing, and implementation directly influence the activities required to achieve the objectives of the enterprise. On closer examination of a series of organizational charts of real estate management companies, the author observed a tendency to use organizational structures that are inefficient. The main objectives of this article are to bring into the practice of real estate management a model of beneficial organizational structure, both for the real estate management companies and for the construction companies that, besides the building activity, also deal with the management of their own real estate, and to emphasize the particular importance of the organizational structure of the company. The appreciation of the organizational structure represents the process of knowledge, understanding, and explanation of the existing situation through a detailed analysis of the factors that influence its condition through: the enterprise development strategy;the type and complexity of services;the size of the enterprise;the quality of human resources;the changes that take place in the external environment of the company, and last but not least, the legal framework and the statutes of the enterprise.