The Role of Rural Municipality (Dehyari) in the Physical-Spatial Developments of Villages Case Study: Ali Abad Katul Central District

Nowadays, special attention is paid to rural sustainable development by planners in order to improve economic, social, and environmental conditions. The general objective of this study is to evaluate the role of rural municipality in urbanization of rural areas from the perspective of sustainable development in the central district of the city of Ali Abad Katul. The research methodology is descriptive-analytical and survey type with applied purpose. The studied statistical population is 3591 rural households out of which 350 individuals were selected as the sample size by the use of Cochrane’s formula. Data analysis was conducted by the use of Wilcoxon, McNemar, Freidman, Chi-Square, Phi/Crammer, Man Whitney tests, and independent t-test in SPSS environment. The results of Man Whitney test showed that although in some items such as change of farming application to animal husbandry and animal husbandry to residential area or social service usage such as public bathrooms, slaughter house, and fire station; there was no significant difference among “villages with rural municipality operating over one decade and villages with newly established rural municipality”, there is significant relationship up to confidence level of 99% between rural municipality and development of economic indexes; and rural municipality plays positive roles in economic development of villages. In addition, qualitative improvement of environment because of improvement in the living conditions after establishment of rural municipality shows 99% significant relationship. In addition, in order to evaluate the relationship between good performance of rural municipality and increase motivation to stay in the villages, Phi/Crammer was used and its results showed significant relationship with up to 99% confidence. It means that the higher the performance level of rural municipality is, the lower the level of immigration from villages would be. Therefore, encouraging rural municipality for improvement of performance and consequently stabilization of the rural population in the villages or decrease of immigration, in order to make optimized use of existing capabilities and physical-spatial improvement of the villages or urbanization is an essential and unavoidable issue.