گسترش افقي شهرها و ظرفيتهاي موجود زمين مورد شهر يزد

Urban Sprawl and the Capacities of Land in Yazd

If we consider the urban sustainable development as the economic efficiency, social equity, and environment protection, one important element will be the optimization of urban land use. Today, this factor is not well much taken into account in our cities such as Yazd. Yazd, the appearance and origin of which get back to the Islamic era, has experienced two Development Scenarios, like the other old cities in Iran. The first was the organic model which was in use until Pahlavi time and led to surface expansion, especially before the Land Reform in the 1940s. Its effects can mostly be seen in urban population growth. In this process, fundamental changes were generally of content elements, and growth patterns of the city remained compressed. The other scenario experienced in Yazd in the last 25 years, was non-organic model of growth. In this process, the surface growth was faster than the population one. The city spread horizontally, and the space provided was more than what peoples needed. What came out of this growth are as the following: Loss of congruity among parts of the city; scattered development and haphazard expansion; abandonment of old parts of the city; low population density in the city as a whole; difficulty in providing city services such as pipewater, electricity, etc; undesirable quality and proportion in land use; pieces of land with no use in the city; expansion of the city on the reserved lands of protected areas; environmental problems, hoarding lands, etc ... . The process of land supply has an important role in the development of the city. However, the hasty process of land supply in Yazd has led lots of wast rural areas, with low population density, both agricultural and waste lands, to be within the city region. Without efficient management and plan, lands are divided, sold, and bought illegally. Different indexes of growth in the regional and national analyses indicate that Yazd has been greatly suffered from this process. Findings also show that in the present city region land is not used properly. As a result Yazd needs no expansion for the next 25 years.