On the Analysis of Factors Affecting Urban Sustainability (Case Study: Ardabil City)

Subject Areas : Urban and Regional Planning Studies

L.  Sayad ¹ (Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Payame Noor University, Iran)
Y.  Gholipour ² (M.A in Geography & Urban Planning, Payame Noor University, Iran)
S.  Feyzi ³ (Ph.D candidate in Geography & Urban Planning,Tabriz University, Tabriz, Iran)

Received: 2016-12-31 Accepted : 2017-09-11 Published : 2017-08-23

Keywords: Exploratory Factor Analysis, Ardabil, Citizens, Urban Sustainability,

Abstract :

  Urbanization development and growing process of urban population has caused problems such as excessive use of resources, environmental pollution, increased social anomalies and economic problems at urban communities. Sustainable development has been the main slogan in the third millennium and the new paradigm in the most popular theoretical and scientific literature concerning urban development and planning. The objective of this study was to analyze and categorize the factors affecting urban sustainability in Ardebil city from the citizens' points of view as the main beneficiaries of urban planning program. The study was descriptive-analytical research and the method of collecting information was documentary and survey (Field Finder). Population were the citizens of Ardabil city. The sample size included 384 members based on Cochran formula, while there was a two stage cluster sampling method. The 26 items of the research questionnaire were reduced to five factors using exploratory factor analysis. All the five factors explain 68.059 percent of total variance. The first factor (environment design) plays the most important role with specific value 5.636 (21.676% of variance) in setting all effective variance factors on urban sustainability. Then the social factor with specific value 3.707 (14.259% of variance), management factor with specific value 3.695 (14.212% of variance) economic-infrastructural factor with specific value 475/2 (518/9% of variance) environmental factor with specific value 183.2 (8.3394 percent variance) were located at second, third, fourth, and fifth level of factors affecting urban sustainability.

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