International Journal of

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Throughout the early and mid 1990s, there was widespread faith in the compact city model's ability to provide urban sustainability. However, where compact city policies had been implemented, follow-up studies began to show the predicted benefits did not happen as they should be. The article tries to peruse two opposite approaches of "Urban Sprawl" and "Compact City", with an analytical - critical procedure and their consistency with sustainability. It also compares sustainability strategies of the new urban design paradigms (such as New Urbanism, Transit Oriented Development (TOD) and Smart Growth) with compact city considerations. At the end, the article discusses about the question that does the compact city paradigm creates an obligatory context for sustainability? In fact, This article supports the belief that instead of concentrating on one particular solution, there is a need to recognize and accept the fact that a divers urban futures are likely to exist within a city and that urban compaction should only be seen as one way of achieving sustainable urban form. As indicated in the article ,each country should adapted the compact city considerations that best suits the local conditions and makes the best contribution to urban sustainability in a way that is both acceptable and feasible in their local environments. Because of the many challenges that the compact city concept faces, the focus should be on creating a diverse urban forms and sustainabilities that are most likely to 'fit' the area they are to be implemented in. Indeed, there should be a greater focus upon the processes, functions and design of the city and how they contribute to sustainability, rather than just the density dimension of compact city which occupied most of the literature throughout the 1990s. By concentrating on a more micro level scale, urban design can help overcome acceptability and feasibility critiques of the compact city that correctly highlight the radical cultural, political, social and institutional changes that will be required to move away from the sprawl.

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Living in satisfying urban environments is important for an individual’s well-being. In order to create such environments, planners, designers, and policy makers need to understand the structures that cause residents to feel satisfied with their environments. This paper focuses on the perceived quality of urban residential environments: dwellings and neighborhoods. First, literature review was conducted to extract a list of relevant attributes of environmental quality (EQ), which in turn became the theoretical basis for the rest of this work. Next, the general research methodology, the multi-attribute evaluation of perceived quality of urban residential environments, was presented. Hierarchical multiple regression was used for data analysis. Using written questionnaire, residents in two neighborhoods of Tehran, Zafaranieh and Khaniabad were asked to evaluate their present residential situation on the various residential attributes. Due to the presence of north-south dichotomy in Tehran, researcher tried to compare perceptions of the residents of these two neighborhoods. Regressing the general satisfaction evaluations on the specific evaluations revealed a model fit which appeared to be relatively high (49%). It was concluded that next to physical attributes, psycho-social attributes and attributes of built environments are relevant attributes, and EQ may best be seen as a hierarchical multi-attribute concept. Subjective evaluations varied across two neighborhoods and results showed that older people were somewhat more satisfied with their residential environments than younger people.

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Abstract Environmental Justice (EJ) concept consists of multifaceted movements, community struggles, and discourses in contemporary societies that seek to reduce environmental risks, increase environmental protections, and generally reduce environmental inequalities suffered by minority and poor communities a term that incorporates ‘environmental racism’ and ‘environmental classism,’ captures the idea that different racial and socioeconomic groups experience differential access to environmental quality. This article explores environmental justice as an urban phenomenon in urban planning and applies it in peri-urban environment of a metropolis. Tehran peri-urban environments which are the result of meeting the city- village- nature systems or "city-village junction" have gradually faced effects such as accelerated environmental decline, changes without land-use plan, and severe service deficiencies. These problems are instances of environmental injustice which make the planners to adjust the problems and use and apply the appropriate strategies and policies by looking for solutions and resorting to theories, techniques and methods related to environmental justice. In order to access to this goal, try to define environmental justice through justice and determining environmental justice indices to analysis environmental injustice in case study. Then, make an effort to introduce some criteria to select case study in two micro and micro levels. Qiyamdasht town as the peri-urban environment of Tehran metropolis is chosen and examined to show the existence of environmental injustice by questionnaire analysis and SPSS software. Finally, use AIDA technique to design a strategic plan and reduce environmental injustice in case study by introducing the better scenario to be used in policy- and decision-making areas.

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According to several researches sustainable development is based on three different dimensions of sustainability social and economical dimensions and ecological or environmental sustainability. These dimensions are recognized as basic elements of sustainable development. This research tries to evaluate social sustainability at some neighborhoods in Karaj. Considering the fact that urban neighborhoods, as the smallest units of cities have a high importance in cities and their sustainability are a positive step toward sustainable development as well as social cohesion of city. In this research five neighborhoods have been selected with 320 questionnaires for sampling. Assessment of the related variables was made through determining a collection of indicators. The collected data via specialist questionnaires were analyzed using SPSS software. The reason for which Kendall’s test was selected to study the meaningfulness relationship of the research variables and the concept of social sustainability is the largeness and qualitative feature of the N volume. The result of the research is the proving meaningfulness of the relationship between the defined variables and the notion of social sustainability except social participation. Level of social Sustainability in the neighborhoods are not the same and there is high gap between them (about 2.6).In addition education indicator has the highest level of sustainability between the neighborhoods (0.024). Access to the recreational facilities indicated the highest level of difference between sustainable and unsustainable neighborhoods (74%). This means that even in sustainable neighborhoods despite the dependency and happiness of the residents, the rate of participation has been at a low level and the residents do not have a positive view resulted from confidence to the performance of civil managers. In other words, there is a kind of homogenization in this component between urban neighborhoods.

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As a common space, urban entrance is the first place that introduces a city to its visitors and it is imprinted in the memory of people. This study aims to provide a detailed analysis of physical development and activity patterns along the main entrance of Rasht, Iran. Utilized data in this research comes from a questionnaire survey through which 707 land lots along the main entrances were studied. A number of statistical methods including nonparametric test of Kruskal-Wallis and crosscorrelation analysis were used to analyze the collected data. Findings indicated that entrance axes in Rasht present a low density pattern, in the form of single row shops with ‎sporadic low rise buildings and uneven distribution of activities mainly by auto-‎related shops and services.‎ dala aeatsysy aaaaataD‎ a significant difference in the development of physical elements such as density of land lots, lot size, building age, quality of structure and land use/activity pattern among the main entrances. Data results also showed that density of development along the entrances is associated with land use type and ownership. Moreover, the data showed that the age ‎of a building is correlated with ‎quality of structure, land use type ‎and ownership and quality of ‎structure is related with land use type and ownership‎. ‎ Adopting a number of urban planning approaches such as density increase, encouraging mixed land uses, and employing local architectural styles in building design could enhance the exterior outlook, increase the land value, expedite investments and eventually improve the economy along the entrance axes.

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The concept of redevelopment is accompanied by actions and forecasts to improve the quality of the physical-spatial environment inthe cities, that is by the emergence of new facilities and conditions, improving the spatial environment is achieved. This requirement occurs when the coherence, coordination and the performance of the urban area is diminishing and is not responsive to the requirements of that area. The brownfields are amongst the inefficient urban areas and require redevelopment, which mostly include Deteriorated buildings accompanied by environmental contamination. The main issue of the present study is the lack of a compiled and appropriate roadmap to redeveloping the brownfields in Iran. Accordingly this article is seeking to introduce and present the defining indicators of brownfields, adapt these indicators to Iran's condition and achieve the redevelopment roadmap of these lands in Iran. In this regard, the codification of this article has been done by the descriptive-analytical method. Results of the study show that the main problem of Iran's planning system is the lack of a regulatory and legal description of brownfields on one hand, and absence of a compiled roadmap to lead urban development into the zone and use the capable potentials and opportunities for redevelopment

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Electronic cities result from the implication of information and communication technology (ICT) in the contemporary era. Significant ICT development and internet network expansion as well as the need of urban management to new ideas in managing cities lead us toward a new strategy called "electronic cities". The current study aims at investigating the Electronic Cities' Strategic Planning Case Study: Uremia, Iran. The research method is documentary and survey research population consists of mangers and specialists working in Uremia's urban planning and ICT, obtained from Morgan table. To collect data, Likert spectrum is employed. Findings indicate that the most important challenges in the way of establishing an electronic city include the lack of strategic document for urban development, high number of decision-making centers and administrative extra parallel works among them, the inclination of the urban managers toward traditional methods, low-speed, high-cost internet connection, the lack of infrastructures for ICT, the lack of digital literacy among citizens and so on. With respect to ANOVA results, findings indicate that some of the sub elements play a key role in the establishment of electronic cities. Concerning the inequality of the role of factors effective on the establishment of electronic cities, each factor's sub elements has been ranked through multi-criteria decision making techniques and TOPSIS model. According to the findings, some strategies have been recommended, which need the serious care of urban managers and planners in the metropolitan Uremia.

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Due to audiences’ diversity, local cultural spaces have the highest share in residents’ mass life. Therefore, these spaces are the necessary environment for social relations and face-to-face communication of residents of urban area. If these are well qualified, welfare would be promoted. This study aims at identifying and evaluating factor influencing quality of local cultural spaces and aims to recognize and prioritize the factor using AHP analytical hierarchical process so as to promote them. This applied study has a descriptive-analytical basis with a population of 75 experts in urban planning and cultural matters and academic staff used as participants. First, the quality criteria of cultural space was determined based on the 4 main criteria and 26 sub-criteria in a hierarchical tree. Then experts were asked to score the major and minor criteria and specify their priorities based on paired comparisons. Applying the Expert Choice which implements the AHP, the weights of each criterion and sub-criterion were estimated respectively. Finally, according to the study’s aim, priorities were determined. The results obtained showed that the physical criteria, weighting 0.557, got the first priority and it was followed by social (0.162), economic (0.148) and environmental (0.133) criteria which got the second to the fourth rank. The sub-criteria affecting the "quality of cultural spaces" of the physical structure included safety, human scale and availability.

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The purposeofthispaper is to examinethe impacts ofphysical contextson theefficacy oflocalmosques. The main question of thisresearchis: “What istherelationship betweenphysical context (including:number and space share per head of mosque in neighborhood, functional radius of mosque, the location of local mosque, local adjacent land uses and finally legibility and identity of local mosque in neighborhoods) and efficacy of local mosques? The research hypothesisis based on the assumption that there is a meaningful relation between physical context of mosques and their expected socio- cultural efficacyinurban neighborhoods. The method of the research has been analytical descriptive.In order to examine the hypothesis, variables “physical components of the mosquesandtheirefficacy" have been assigned. Applying“the Theory of Environmental Quality”, theindexes of each variable have been determined and applied in questionnaire to be evaluated in case studies. The data of the study wereanalyzed through SPSS software and the hypothesis was confirmed with 95% confidence level. Theresearch resultsrevealedthatphysicalcontext ofmosques can have a positive influence on their function of efficacy which consists of socialsolidarity, sense of belongingand sense of religiousaffiliationsofpeople through the five above mentioned factors.

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Transformation of land use-land cover change occurs due to the numbers and activities of people. Urban growth modeling has attracted authentic attention because it helps to comprehend the mechanisms of land use change and thus helps relevant policies made. This study applied logistic regression to model urban growth in the Ahvaz Metropolitan Area of Khuzestan province in IDRISI Selva software and to discover what are driving forces effective on the urban growth of Ahvaz city, and with what intensity? Historical land use and land cover data of Ahvaz were extracted from the 1991and 2006 Satellite images. The following two groups of factors were found to affect urban growth in different degrees as indicated by odd ratios: (1) Constraints Distance to the Bridge, Rural Areas, Planned town and Industry activities (all with odds ratios<1_or coefficient <0); and (2) Number of urban cells within a 5·5 cell window, Distance to the Hospitals, Main Road, High Road, Rail Line, River, CBD and Secondary centers, agriculture areas in distance more than 5km of Urban area and Vacant area (all with odds ratios>1_or coefficient >0). Relative operating characteristic (ROC) value of 0.906 indicates that the probability map is valid. It was concluded logistic regression modeling is suitable for Understanding and measuring of driving forces effect on urban growth. Second, unlike the Cellular Automata (CA) model, the logistic regression model is not temporally explicit; urban growth trend in Ahvaz isn't in the event of infill development strategy. Also, variables of sprawl based agents indicate more power than to compact base agents.

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Preset paper aims to recognize the most important factors in creating a smart city in the city of Ahvaz. For achieving this, all criteria, which play an important role in creating smart cities, were collected using different resources based on descriptive-analytical method. At the next stage, a survey of a number of 40 urban planning experts was accomplished in Ahvaz city, which is the case study of the research, to rank smart city criteria and sub-criteria in terms of importance using Fuzzy TOPSIS technique. The results showed that among six criteria, “smart government” with the score of 4 percent was ranked as the most important criterion and “smart environment” with the score of around 1.5 percent was recognized as the least important criterion in the regard of creating a smart city. Moreover, of the sub-criteria, “Stable economy and ability to transform”, “Social and ethnic plurality”, “Crisis management and ability to organize human resources”, “local and regional accessibility”, “Sustainable resource management”, and “Individual Safety” were recognized as the most important factors in different aspects of making the city smart.

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The problems of distressed urban areas are getting worse year after year. Due to limited resources and Amenities of municipal organizations for solving every problem concerning urban distressed textures, it is essential to determine the priorities of each area based on identified factors and criteria. In distressed areas, there are different circumstances and distinctive citizens with their needs and special expectations, so in this article we face many criteria with fuzziness. This study aimed to apply the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) to prioritize the most important issues for each urban distressed area in Karaj. For this purpose a hierarchical model with 4 main factors (social, physical, environmental and economic) and 17 sub factors were suggested. Four zones of the city (central Karaj, Hesarak, Mehrshahr and Fardis) were analyzed. The findings of the paper suggest that social factors with a weights of about 30% are the most significant problems cause in these areas and physical factors with 27% weight we’re in second place. Among the areas, Fardis and Hesarak areas were most affected by social factors and Central Karaj and Mehrshar had the most priority for physical factors.

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Rapidly increasing urbanization in the world, especially in developing countries, let to increasing urban extents. Rapid urban growth causes to appearance many problems such as wasting environmental resources, inability of providing necessary services for citizens and unplanned growth. Urban mangers and planners need tools for understanding amount and size of future urban growths to prevent these problems. Urmia as capital city of west Azerbaijan province, in the last decades has considerable growth in both extent and population. This rapid growth caused to lose most high value agricultural resources in its surrounding. It has also caused many problems for urban management. Therefore, how city managers and urban planners can be aware of magnitude and location of Urmia city’s future growth and what is the best growth scenario for Urmia city? This paper uses a quantitative analysis research methodology to prediction and evaluation of growth scenarios for Urmia city. In this paper, SLEUTH model was applied to predict future urban growth of Urmia until 2050. Two different scenarios were employed include: Historical Growth Scenario (HGS) and Environment Protection Scenario (EPS). The result highlight that if the city continues its growth based on HGS scenario, in compare with growth based on EPS scenario, it would occupy more area. In this paper, we concluded that the EPS scenario can be more sufficient than HGS scenario. In addition, SLEUTH urban growth model can be used as a planning support model for urban planners and managers decisions for Urmia city based on scenarios.

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According to several types of research, one of the most important issues and principles of sustainable development that urban professionals pay attention to it recently is Just City. One aspect of Justice in cities, spatial justice, has particular significance by Unequal and discordant Expanding in cities regarding creating unequal areas. On the other hand, the urban spatial structure affects the equal distribution of elements and services. If this structure is devoid of justice ideology will lead to a complex social crisis and spatial issues as spatial conflict. Accordingly, this study aims to analyse the spatial justice and structure in the case of Yazd city to know how they influence each other. Spatial justice is examined from the view of "Equality of opportunity". Involved criteria are "equality", "Physical diversity", "human diversity" and "urban spaces", and spatial structure based on “Space Syntax” technique with "integration", "control", "connect" and " intelligibility " parameters. These criteria are Scored and analysed by FDAHP techniques and GIS. The result shows favourable status in the Central District, and as getting away from the disadvantaged downtown District increased. On the other hand, the spatial structure analysis reveals the most spatial coherent analogue the north-south axis with a little depth and isolated District (Spatial segregations) have located in the corners and edges of the city. Results from the superposition of these two analysis layers show a compatibility relation between the spatial structure of Yazd and the pattern of justice distribution except in the central and historical centre.

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Urban planning rules and considering land use regarding faults can change the consequences of natural hazard such as earthquake. Vulnerability risk is increasing in Region 1 because of existence of the north fault, steep slopes and continuous construction of high-rise buildings. It is clear that Region 1’s Master Plan shouldn’t be prepared without considering natural hazard such as earthquake. This study targets two main goals, first, to assess the degree of land use vulnerability to seismic risk and second, to classify areas based on their vulnerability degree. Nine indicators were extracted from previous studies to analyze the vulnerability of land use in Master Plan of Region 1, Tehran. According to different features of each indicator a score from 1 to 4 was allocated for each feature. The vulnerability degree of 181 areas were shown using Categorical Principle Component Analysis (CATPCA) in which areas were divided into four categories and the final result was visualized. The main results of this study showed that more about 50% of the areas were located in the highly-at-risk region. It was concluded that increase in the building density, number of floors, and distance from open spaces would be resulted in higher risk of earthquake damage. The major practical contribution of the present research was that it provided evidence to show that much focus required on reconsidering seismic risk in the future plans.

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Informal settlement as a global urban phenomenon encounters different social, physical and economic shortcomings. These fabrics especially in cities of the global south experience an escalating gap with developed urban areas. In this regard, faltering economy plays a major contribution in continuity of poverty and exclusion. In Iran, Empowerment plan could not lead to favorable and stable results which has mainly been related to stereotypic, homogenizing and dehumanizing viewpoints to current empowerment plans. As regards the ultimate effectiveness of place branding becomes true in economic context and these settlements are one of suitable candidates for branding, the main aim of this study is improving economic empowerment plans realization for informal settlements through integration urban planning with place branding process to determine more efficient strategies for falak-e-din informal neighborhood by its identity and discovering how place branding, economic empowerment and place identity have conceptual, practical relations with each other to signify this integration. The method of present study is mainly qualitative which is best to cognition of place complexities. Falak-E-Din settlement, has been selected as the case study because it benefits from place market maker advantages and yet encounters the threat of identity crisis. Surveying practical and theoretical facets of Results show place branding with a focus on marketing view is trying to use all aspects of the place(as a complete identity) to draw the image of economic prosperity through comprehensive branding strategy. The findings from analysis of gathered data from inhabitants(observation, interview and archival data) by SWOT and evaluation through brand creation process in Falak-E-Din quarter by ANP ( Analytic Network Process) based on evaluation criteria- reveal the best alternative for creating Falak-E-Din quarter brand is to provide brand strategies based on the brand identity which is built with an emphasis on quarter human factors. Accordingly brand strategies are codified at four main steps to create chosen brand identity: create direct and indirect job opportunities, physical elicitation of place personality with execution of physical components of the brand identity, physical complementary proceedings, and eventually marketing proceedings which include final actions that lead the place to its economic purposes.

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The aim of evaluating and studying the creative city indicators of the city of Qazvin is to determine the creativity trend of this city during the past years and to recognize the dominant field of creativity for this city. Therefore, this study has tried to analyze the creative city indicators about the city of Qazvin by using “descriptive-analysis” method as well as applying secondary data, TOPSIS model, AHP model and SPSS software. First, 13 indicators have been collected to determine the creativity trend from2009 to 2015, then the current trend of creativity in recent years has been obtained using quantitative models. Regardless of the year 2009 and the years before that, the best rank belongs to 2013 with 0.3228 scores. Generally, the creativity trend has decreased with a gentle slope in recent years. In the following sections, within introducing the dominant field of creativity among the five investigated fields, this conclusion has been made that the city of Qazvin has potentials to move toward a creative city.

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This Paper attempts to investigate the patterns of land cover changes and also the process of urban growth in Shiraz Metropolitan Area. Since detailed information of current urban processes is required for future developments and managements of urban areas, this study utilizes remote sensing data and landscape metrics, as useful tools to gather information on urban growth and dynamics, in order to examine the spatial pattern of Shiraz metropolitan area (SMA) from 1986 to 2014. Since, the northwestern areas of SMA are superior in terms of ecological advantages, analysis of types and patterns of SMA growth were separately examined for each sector (NW, NE, SE, and SW). Five landscape metrics were used to analyze compactness and dispersion of urban patches derived from remotely sensed images. The results showed that over the past 28 years, SMA experienced sweeping changes with unexplainable growth during 1996-2006: a great horizontal expansion with 5.89 percent annual growth rate. After facing great urban sprawl, especially on the edge of the main city in the 96-06 period, periphery rural areas beyond the city borders started growing drastically during last decade. While measuring landscape metrics indicates a process of compactness in the growth patterns of NE, SE and SW areas, NW is going to be more dispersed in the coming years.

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“The urban researches in Iran aren't applicable to the real challenges of Iran’s cities”. In order to examine the mentioned hypothesis, “existing problems of Iran’s cities” and “Iran’s urban researches” are compared by means of the urban news and research journals. The framework analyze method [a kind of qualitative research method] has been used to analyze the data in the form of axial-thematic codes. The findings showed researches conform to problems approximately 78 percent in themes but the importance and preference of both themes and axial codes in researches differ from existing problems, which indicates some researches don't concern problems.

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Nowadays, “Smart City” is a very growing and promoting concept. Unlike other concepts related to cities, like digital or green city, it encompasses all technological, human and institutional factors. However, there are too many different viewpoints and definitions of this concept in the literature. The problem statement of this research is that despite the existence of many points of view and definitions for the “smart city” concept, the management part of a particular city needs to formulate a special definition of “smartness” based on the specific characteristics, goals, priorities, policies, and constraints of that city. This paper provides urban planners and managers with an approach that helps them to determine a set of validated, customized and prioritized characteristics for the target city. These characteristics can be used to formulate a desired definition for the city, as an input for strategic planning of a smart city, a guide for aligning the main goals of a city, and a criterion for prioritizing the urban projects for a particular city. Our proposed approach consists of two phases. The first phase is based on a thorough content analysis on the significant body of the literature in order to take a valid and acceptable range of different viewpoints and characteristics of the smart city notion. The second phase relies on the characteristics resulted in the first phase and involves a specific form of validation, customization and prioritization steps for a particular city so as to determine a set of unique characteristics based on the upstream documents and stakeholders’ opinions. In order to show the applicability of the proposed approach, we present the results of applying this approach for the city of Tehran, the capital of Iran.