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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The life of Towns has become more important and greatly emphasized in recent years and this heralds the arrival of a new era when this type of settlements is introduced as major living and investment capacities. Therefore, it is necessary to study the different aspects of towns in order to plan and manage their development and answer the question about different decision-making mechanism in them. In the present study, after explaining the place and role of towns in the development transition period, the local governance mechanism is introduced as the main issue of such cities through a qualitative radial model literature review. By examining several recent studies on towns, it is found that the type of relations between individuals and actors on the one hand, and the impact of their activities and functions on the decisions made on national and regional scales on the other hand, create a different form of local governance mechanism in these cities than in large cities. Accordingly, the existing recognition and analysis processes and tools, that are primarily designed to assess the conditions of large cities, cannot be used. According to the present study, the decision-making mechanism can be an appropriate structure for expressing the complex relationships between actors in towns. As a result, a relational framework can be introduced to explain the decision-making mechanism in the local governance process of towns. This framework is designed based on the general international literature and experiences and can serve as a preliminary tool used for the identification and examination of the administrative mechanisms in towns and be modified and improved in various fields through future researches.