Urban Form and Sustainable Development: The Case of Urmia City

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 directly affects habitat, ecosystems, endangered species, and water quality through consumption, fragmentation, and or replacement of the natural cover with an impervious surface. The current research aims at identifying the urban model of Urmia City so to achieve a sustainable form. This study is applied and utilizes both descriptive and analytical methods. To measure the model of urban growth, Holdern, Shannon’s entropy, Moran and Geary’s coefficients were employed. The findings indicate that the model of urban growth is sprawl and this may leads to ecological, social and economical and urban form that is unsustainable. Regarding the consequences of sprawl growth and the movement toward achieving a sustainable development and sustainable urban form, it appears that the decentralized centralization method (changing one central city into multicentre one based on centralization and multiplication of activities in sub centers) with the emphasis on principles and strategies of urban smart growth is the best model for achieving sustainable form in the future.