A Review of Sustainable Community Development Policies through an Assetbased Approach, with Emphasis on Social & Physical Capital

The increasing complexities of the urban life, particularly in metropolitan areas, have created much difficulty in recent urban studies. Therefore, in recent decades study of the urban condition at lower levels and within the framework of communities or neighborhoods was brought forward, concentrating on different approaches to the community development. In a number of these approaches it has been emphasized that social capital is the main factor and a necessary prerequisite for community development. In addition, the psychological aspects of life which covers people's attitudes to their life and living environment, is considered as one of the main factors in evaluating the quality of life or the output of community development plans. The sustainable relation between man and environment is based on the potential interaction of human needs and potentials of the physical environment.Community or neighborhood development is aimed at building a human environment that responds efficiently to the human needs in settlements, including the basic human needs, as well as higher tier, social and psychological needs. These would be satisfied when a strong sense of community, as a social capital, is developed. In turn, social capital is a good means to promote an indigenous and sustainable development. Community sustainable development is a concept that was presented after the concept of sustainable development was unfortunate in achieving its aims, and therefore further emphasis was placed on local society efforts to access goals of sustainable at measurable dimensions. Asset-based approach to sustainable community development emphasizes the existing assets in the community. It is emphasizes on capacity building, mobilizing local resource and public local capital which consists of social capital and physical capital. Furthermore asset based approach is process oriented, comprehensive and an important tool to achieve local sustainable development. Planners and policymakers have recognized the role of the local assets, including physical capital (housing stock, roads, and the public space) and social capital (theinformal networks of trust and reciprocity) in creating healthy communities. The critical examination of various urban policies helps us to differentiate between an asset-based as opposed to the conventional need-based approach to policymaking, and to explore the mutual impacts of government policies and the target groups that are affected by them; policies could result in the formation or destruction of the local assets (social capital). The study offers a conceptual framework, consisting of policy networks defined in terms of policy type and target groups. Two additional concepts are used to evaluate the mutual impacts of policies and target groups including interconnectedness (the strength of relationship between the government and the target group) and cohesion (the distribution of objectives among the actors).