حمید ماجدی

 Following the growing urbanization, choosing and providing housing has become one of the mos t important issues for planners as well as people. Developing a comprehensive program of housing needs complete identification and deep analysis of widespread dimensions of housing and factors affecting them. In the meantime, addressing housing indices, as the key planning tool forming its main thrus t, can be the mos t critical step of planning. By conducting research on identifying and analyzing different housing indicators, the effectiveness of housing programs can be greatly increased. However, among the policies and plans that have been made due to the overcoming of economic factors and the lack of clarification of the good housing index, the qualitative indicators of housing have remained somewhat diminished relative to its quantitative dimension, and planners have more focused on providing housing. This research seeks to find and compare the angles of unders tanding and evaluating the residents' viewpoints on the desired housing, and ultimately, address the impact of location on the mental valuation of residents about the cons tructive components of housing quality. The research method is descriptive-analytical and in order to achieve the desired goals, the qualitative indicators of desirable housing are surveyed from residents' point of view in Shahrak-e-Gharb and Monirieh neighborhoods of Tehran. In the formulation of the questionnaire, 48 items are developed in two areas of the residential unit and residential environment, of which only 13 indicators have a significant difference between the two neighborhoods indicating that the spatial domain has no effect on residents’ valuation of housing quality indices and also the average values given to the items show the great importance of the quality of housing for citizens. 

The main purpose of this paper is to explain the factors affecting the change of service land uses in the city of Shiraz and identify its reasons. For this purpose, the second-order confirmatory factor analysis technique has been used as one of the structural equation modeling techniques to determine the severity of the effect of the four factors on land use change, through which a contributing framework for the effects of the four factors (physical, activity, economic, accessibility) on land use change is obtained. Finally, the extent and direction of the factors affecting the realization of service land uses in the city of Shiraz are explained using the structural equation model (SEM). In order to achieve these goals, 50 variables affecting 600 plots in Shiraz city are extracted through field method. The variables are investigated and analyzed using GIS maps, Amos and SPSS software, and a series of bi-variable correlations in a table called correlation matrix or covariance, the most notably of which are confirmatory factor analysis and SEM. The results of the research show that, in total, the selected four factors have a significant effect on the land use change. It is such that the standardized weights of regression for "the effect of the access factor on land use change", "the effect of the economic factor on land use change", "the effect of the activity factor on land use change", and "the effect of the physical factor on land use change" are 0.91, 0.78, 0.65, and 0.56, respectively.

Like other developing countries, Iranian cities are growing and expanding physically at a high speed. For about five decades, the only policy of the urban development plans in the field of urban growth management has been definition of the Urban Growth Boundary (U.G.B.) which is still used without any major modifications. Despite the slight evidences indicating the ineffectiveness of the current policy, there has not been any assured and agreed alternative yet. Today, the waves of new urbanism and other modern paradigms have urged temptations of making fundamental changes in the definition of urban growth boundary. Through an analytic framework, this research investigates the effectiveness of some of the most basic carriers of urban growth in 11 sample cities (each of them introducing one type of Iranian cities). The results of this analysis will illustrate a new vision- a native one - for alternative policies of urban growth management in Iranian cities.

Social diversity in the neighborhood districts has been the new approach for the challenges resulting from varieties in cities. Social interpreters of this policy are to create neighborhoods where people of different ages, ethnic-racial backgrounds, income, etc. take a place in it. In this regard, many designers by using the concept of different forms of ownership such as housing schemas, different types of constructing and housing etc. have tried to promote it. Due to the less interest that came toward this issue, the knowledge of this mechanism is poor in urban ecology of Iran. The aim of this study is to assess the effects of urban design in promoting the social mixing which is determined with the research of the Abadan community areas. Relevant parameters have been studied with library studies, field visits and by the use of qualitative and quantitative analytical methods. Therefore, after reviewing the relevant concepts, we are going to test hypotheses by the exامینation of case studies, and finally, the influences of urban design criteria are presented.