Urban Development of zone22 of Tehran's Municipality toward Smart Growth Strategy

Abstract

The importance of urban form on sustainable development has been recognized in recent years. Since the late 20th century, a number of countries have adopted urban form policies in environmental planning. Urban form Urban form directly affects habitat, ecosystems, endangered species, and water quality through consumption, fragmentation, and or replacement of the natural cover with an impervious surface. In the recent years, the growing process of the increase of urban population in Iran has brought many problems. One of the consequences of this issue is urbanization's outpacing urban development and urban sprawl development which has lead to urban instability and many social, economic, cultural, physical and environmental problems in major cities especially Tehran. This study attempts to investigate the urban development type and how to apply smart urban growth principles for organizing and improving this growth in zone22 of Tehran city.

This study is an applied research and adopts a descriptive-analytical method. In order to assess smart growth indexes (economic, social, cultural-educational, physical and land functions, healthcare, urban facilities and equipment, environmental and accessibility) the ranking of districts and the selection of the best section of TOPSIS model was used as the multi-index decision-making method. At last, the study investigates the correlation between the research variables and the urban smart growth integrated index by employing the regression test.

The research findings reveal that the environmental sections have the most influence on the spatial and physical structure of smart urban growth in zone22 and the physical and land use and the cultural-educational sections occupy the next ranks. Besides, the findings resulted from integrated indexes of smart growth indicate that district 1 with the TOPSIS grade of 0.9156 is known as the top development, and district3 with the TOPSIS grade of 0.5078 is considered as the low development district among Tehran's 22zone.