Factors contributing to urban expansion of Shiraz City, Iran

Abstract

In recent years, urban expansion has become one of the crucial issues in modern cities. This affects natural resources and modifies urban built environments. In cities of developing counties, rapid urban population growth is an impetus to urban expansion. In turn, the need for land and housing to shelter this population as well as demand for social infrastructure has increased dramatically. Thus, the urban model is needed to solve developmental problems in cities. The issue in Shiraz City is that the city is faced with a scarcity of land. The current research is aimed at evaluating urban expansion so as to gain insight into factors generating the growth and its implication in Shiraz City. The quantitative research approach was adopted for the study. The questionnaire survey was used for data collection. The data were analyzed using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The results revealed four principal factors (environmental, sociocultural, economic and urban policy) as well as sixteen variables causing urban expansion in some parts of Shiraz City. The highest degree of variance is however accounted for by economic factor with a variance of 48.7%. The subsequent growth of the city gave rise to fourteen negative effects of urban expansion. Moreover, the research identified four criteria, twenty sub-criteria and two alternatives to be considered when constructing the AHP model. The results revealed that environmental criteria had the highest weight among the major criteria, while air pollution ranked first in the list of sub-criteria of the model. Finally, the developed model was successfully validated, ready for application and implementation. The model and information generated from this research are significant for mitigating the negative effects of urban expansion, so as to maximize the use of scarce urban land in Shiraz City.