Evaluation of land use efficiency in City Centers (Case Study: Shiraz)

Physical urban growth has had different social, economical and physical outcomes. From the perspective of social effects, urban population displacement and mobility could be the most important outcome. Physical dimension of rapid urban development can be defined in terms of urban sprawl, spatial fragmentation, different urban forms and changing of urban mixed land uses. Consequently, changes in the combination of appropriate, consistent and diversity of land uses has become more evident in central parts of cities. These changes have been very prominent in the case of Shiraz. From the perspective of location efficiency or land use intensity, Shiraz central part has had a combination of appropriate, consistent, diversity and mixed land uses in the past. Whenever those conditions have changed, urban decline has emerged too. On the basis of Hoppenbrouwer and Erik Louw’s research on Rowley’s concept, we can develop typology for mixed land use from a spatial perspective and represent four dimensions: shared premise dimension, horizontal dimension, vertical dimension, and periodical dimension. Therefore, this survey has focused on this basic question: what is the relation between urban mixed use dimensions and land use intensity? The main objective of the research is tied to the question, so the research wants to define urban mixed use dimensions as one of the effective variables for analyzing urban land use intensity and zoning inner city intensity. The study domains of mixed land uses and inner-city decay are different. Therefore, one of the challenges of this study is to find a model capable of extracting the relationship between the phenomena of inner city decay and mix use development. Attempts in this line of inquiry led to the selection of the evaluation method regarding locational strength of the urban land uses. This method is based on micro economy theories since they deal with areal extent regarding the intensity and strength of urban land uses. This model is well applied to those areas which accommodate mix land uses, especially the new ones. It tries to find out whether mixed land use pattern is an effective measure or not. It determines the areal extent of both strengths and weaknesses of land uses regarding well-designed and pleasant spatial structure. Therefore, the research method is a combination of Yinan and Chen’s land use intensity zoning control and mixed use dimensions. The application of Yinan and Chen urban land use model and its extension based on analytical hierarchical process and Arc GIS software package regarding determination of areal extent and zoning of degree of strength and weakness of the land uses is being considered as the best method in this regard. Spatial analysis is an appropriate method for analyzing their relations. Also, other statistical methods such as Chi-Square Test, Pearson Correlation, ANOVA and Coefficients have been used. As a result, it is argued that share premise; horizontal, vertical, and periodical dimensions of mix used development approach are capable of explaining 19.1 percent of spatial behavior of Shiraz inner city decay. Regression coefficient associated with both dependent and independent variables indicates that with 1 unit increase in dimension of urban mix land uses located in Shiraz central part, one could see 4.6 unit decrease in the level of inner city decay.