Journal of Geography and Regional Development
Year:2015 | Volume:13 | Issue:1 (24)|Papers Count:13

Despite a lot of plans for rural and remote areas in recent years, many of Iran’s local community's health and medical needs are not enough supplied, yet. Residents of rural and remote community’s situations show that health care services are weaker than urban centers and health and medical indexes in indigenous communities remain unacceptable. Many rural and remote communities have experienced the difficulties of attracting and retaining appropriate and adequately trained medical and health workforce, while residents have faced the problems of accessing appropriate and sustainable health care services. Besides, reactivating these services are woefully inadequate.

Nowadays, sustainable economic development is the most significant economic objective in the developing countries. Accordingly, micro-credits as an efficient strategy could play a vital role in achieving sustainable livelihood in the rural areas. This research aims to study the impacts of micro-credits provided by Omid Entrepreneurship Fund on the economic sustainability in the rural regions of Neyshabour. It attempts to find out how the performance of Omid Entrepreneurship Fund in giving micro-credits could affect the sustainability of the rural economy in the villages under study.

As a result of the urban sprawl, Brownfield areas are accessible in all the cities of the world as well as the Iranian cities such as Mashhad. These vacant lands provide cities with the possibilities of the inner development and more compact cities. In other words, Brownfield areas can promote the compactness by promoting cities in terms of economy durability, social inclusion, and environment sustainability. The Brownfield areas can also be described in terms of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), which itself is a consequences of globalization and the areas of flow formation.In Mashhad, there is a tendency to attract FDI and promote the place of the city on the globalization scale. Moreover, the amount of the Brownfield in the city is high. Therefore, the city authorities decided to develop the Brownfields through the private investment. The present study aims to investigate the Brownfield areas and classify them for the model of investment as it is one of the major issues of concern.

Nowadays, developed nations are well aware of the important educational role of sports and its significant impacts on the social health, promotion of efficiency, national unity, and the proper use of spare time. At the transnational level, sport is an effective means for establishing appropriate relationships between different societies. Therefore, given the evident and influential features of physical activities, providing sport services is one of the most important challenges of a government. On the other hand, the distribution of sport facilities is very important in terms of the social justice and the equal distribution of sport opportunities. The geographical location of some areas of Zanjan and the lack of observation of urban development principles in the past have blocked the way for an equal distribution of the sport facilities in different districts. Therefore there is an urgent need for the uniform establishment and the fair distribution of sport spaces in the city. Thus, this research is an attempt to consider and analyze the distribution of the population and the sport service centers in Zanjan with the goal of directing the attention of the city officials toward this challenge to solve the problem.

The rapid horizontal expansion of the cities during the previous decades has created numerous problems for the cities and has affected the urban environment’s instability. At the end of the 20th century, these problems led to the revision of the urban planning models and the introduction of new ones like the endogenous development. Studies show that third world countries, such as Iran, due to their highly scattered, horizontal model of development, should adopt endogenous development model. The increase in the urban population of the world has created some challenges such as poverty, climate change, congestion, and shortage of housing for the poor which have hindered the sustainable development. In 2008, more than half of the world’s population lived in cities. It is expected that the urban population of the world will exceed to 5 billion people by 2030. It is also expected that the urban population of Asia and Africa would be doubled between the years 2000 and 2030. It is estimated that in Asia, by 2010, more than 2.2 billion people will live in cities. The number of megalopolises in the world will exceed to 500, more than half of which will be located in Asia; therefore, location-finding and the development of urban areas for the sake of their citizen’s welfare becomes a necessity.

Reaching the sustainable development of the country requires much attention to the sustainable development of the rural areas. Therefore, the present study aims to measureand assess the current sustainability level along with the understanding of the differences between the regions with regards to the sustainability indicators in order to make optimal decisions regarding the rural development. Taking this into account,, sustainable development is considered as a dominant approach towards development, henceforth, addressing this issue is of great importance in the realm of development studies.

Due to the emergence of the concept of sustainable cities and the creation of vibrant urban space, the significance of urban green spaces and their establishment has become more evident than before. It is now in the urgent need of attention given the problems such as the increase of urbanism, population density, – pollution, and the warming of urban atmospheres. One of the major relevant challenges is the proper distribution of green spaces in modern cities. This is a dominant aspect of spending leisure time for people in cities, which also enables citizens to have a better chance of access. Hence, the establishment of urban green spaces as a manifestation of urban renewal has been a topic of concern in the past century, and it has been accelerated during the recent decades. However, this issue should be treated more scientifically. Due to the mentioned challenges and their significance, this research measures the optimal establishment of urban green spaces in District 4 in Tabriz. District 4 is the most populated urban residential area in Tabriz. Despite the district condensed population, it involves only a few green spaces. Therefore, building and locating urban green spaces-tailored to the needs of the district population is quite necessary.

Nowadays, in the developing and some developed countries the source separation of the waste project is conducted intensively because of the shortage of keeping abnormal waste places and landfills along with the economic considerations. Hence, the recycling and conversion material organizations of municipalities have done some projects which resulted in increasing the participation of families in the separation of valuable waste. Investigation of the current state of dry waste source separation schemes in Mashhad shows that, currently, about six projects in the field of source separation of waste are executing in Mashhad. It is clear that the success or failure of these kinds of projects depends on the amount of citizens attendance and their participation in these projects; therefore, taking the importance of social, environmental, and economic aspects into consideration along with its special role in the urban development issues, it is necessary to detect the behavioral algorithms of citizens in terms of their assistance for the source waste separation project. As a result, it would be possible to determine the most important variables influencing the citizens’ behavior in this field and to enhance the possibility of adopting the targeted policies in order to improve the citizens’ assistance level for the source separation of the waste project as well as increasing the level of the cost efficiency of the adopted policies.

After the Islamic revolution, the urban population increase resulted in the striking expansion of cities along with the higher extent of land development in many cities and regions of the country. In the recent years, taking a decrease in population into consideration, the land expansion in the urban regions such as Mazndaran has gone through a dramatic increase, therefore, presenting services and infrastructures more than demands of the population as well as the change in the inhabitation style are considered as the major consequences of this trend. Regarding this issue, the tendency to the land expansion within the urban region has decreased in favor of the expansion toward outer regions of the cities with less density which leads to the house sprawl on the outskirts of the urban areas. This paper aims to analyze the effect of population factors and land development on the spatial sprawl pattern. The scope of our study is important due to the population concentration, services, labor, and management in Mazandaran province. While the land development onthe suburbs has increased, small population changes have been noticed. Because of the importance of the urban regions and its developmental trend to the study attempts at analyzing the impact of demographic factors and land development on sprawl.

The increasing growth and the development of the cities along with the consequences of modernism and urbanism necessitate the growth of green spaces and parks which play and effective role in improving the conditions and quality of citizen’s life and their peace and enjoyment; however, nowadays public parks, which are one of the most important elements of such public spaces, have created numerous problems for the safety of the citizens, endangering the health of all the citizens, especially the children and the elderly. Thus, all over the world, the issue of safety in such spaces is of paramount importance and concern regarding the latest incidents in these places, specifically public parks in metropolises which necessitates a scientific review while considering its relation to all of their operators and beneficiaries. To this end, the present research aims to review the safety of public parks in Mashhad according to five factors including perception of safety, hygienic safety, physical safety, psychological safety, and physical accessibility.

Various studies show that developments which are not environmentally friendly are not sustainable. Realization of sustainable development hinges on pursuing economic growth and satisfying all the basic needs, along with keeping the necessary conditions for this status to continue (Alavizadeh, 2007). Instability is the option confronting stability. Instability subsumes the dimension of time. Instability is indicative of future threats which might be identified later in time. For instance, waste water, considering the amount of pollutants they contain, are a threat to the public health and the environment and can imperil the human health and its existence (Faraji, 2011). Thus, produced waste water contains various microbial, physical, and chemical pollution. The direct release of streams of waste water in human environment spoils the underground and the surface water sources and contaminates them. Due to the penetration of waste water, all the sources such as water, soil, and air would be contaminated. Besides, the plants, the marine creatures, and animals would suffer, too. Hence, they are endangered in various ways (Naghsinepoor, 1373). To this end, the present research aims to evaluate the effects of released urban waste water on the economic instability of Savojbolagh villages. Taking the mentioned points into account, it is hypothesized that there is a significant difference between the economic status of households who are subjected to waste water and the ones who are not.