Environmental Citizenship and Analysis of Citizenship Behavior in Qazvin City

Cities are the living organisms and constantly changing and evolving. Changes in the physical, socio-cultural, and natural environment are inevitable in the process of urban development. These changes are the result of planning through development plans or they happen without any planning. Obviously, changes that are along with the past are optimized and changes that are discontinuous with it are not. Trend of changes in recent decades shows that natural values and sometimes historical and heritage values have been overlooked. The disappearance of these values, results in destroying the identity of cities.Citizens take more responsibility to their urban environment. Their behavior in the urban environment that called "environmental behavior" may seem small, but when it is viewed as a whole, shows its importance. Citizens don't only have the right of contributing to improve the urban environment but also have the duty of protecting different values in cities. Citizens should recognize their duties and know that they should raise their awareness of the urban problems, being sensitive and concern for the problems, enhance their skills to decrease these problems, and participate in solving these problems, to create environmental citizenship behavior.Thus, in this paper, after reviewing the existing literature in the field of environmental behavior, the most important contexts and factors of environmental behavior have been extracted. Environmental behavior of Qazvin's citizens has been reviewed and analyzed also. This city, in recent decades, had faced with considerable development pace and some problems such as, loss of orchards surrounding the city (environmental values) and the loss of historical contexts (historical_ heritage values). So, after evaluating the sensitivity and concerns of Qazvin's citizens about the main changing trends, the level of environmental citizenship behavior is questioned and both the causes and contexts of this behavior are obtained. Total purpose of this study is identification and analysis of contexts of Qazvin citizen's environmental behavior and its methodologies are survey and Correlational. Population of this study is Qazvin citizens that base of Cochran Formula, the number of sample is 233 people. In order to analyze the questions of the questionnaire, one-dimensional square test and to find the correlation between variables, Spearman correlation and Kruskal–Wallis tests are used. The results indicate a low level of environmental citizenship behavior of citizens in Qazvin. The most important factors in this case, are the low level of knowledge, lack of infrastructure, institutional, and legal factors for the occurrence of these behaviors.In fact, among the three actions that are defined in this study as the environmental behavior (including membership in environmental organizations, increase the knowledge on urban environmental issues, and protest to urban environment problems), Qazvin's citizens only study environmental issues, and other behaviors are very low. Accordingly, Citizenship education, codification (according to the Legal rights and criminal rights together), demonstrating the desired behavior or the consequences of inappropriate behavior and providing the contextual factors to outbreak the behavior (especially increase the communications between the public and authorities), are the main suggestions for changing environmental citizenship behavior.... Keywords: Environmental Citizenship, Environmental Behavior, Citizens, Qazvin City.