ali hossein rayatifard

The rapid growth of the urban population in Shiraz over the past few decades has caused the physical expansion of the city and its enchroschment on sorrounding villages and settlemnts leading to numerous challenges and inadequacies in the pheripheral regions there. Some of these problems are poverty, marginalization, rising housing prices, lack of adequate facilities and welfare services, environmental pollution and overcrowding. Using different indicators, the present study tries to evaluate the inadequacy of peripheral settlements of Shiraz metropolis. Thus, in order to manage urban growth and its related difficulties, developing countries have decided to implement various policies such as family planning, rural development, controlling rural-urban migration, limiting the growth of large cities, symmetrical urbanization and new city development. Nevertheless, most developing countries have witnessed rapid population displacement to mega cities in recent decades.On the other side, despite metropolis’ role in national development, increasing process of metropolitanization in most developing countries has cussed many problems which resulted in many challenges in the end. City sprawl and relocation of activities and populations from centre to outskirts of the city as well as the population distribution is one of the most important sustainable challenges in metropolitan areas. In developing countries, growth and expansion of metropolis space has been associated with various issues and resulted in different types of environmental problems such as reduction of life quality, rapid growth and mis-management of low-income settlements on the outskirts and continuation of such problems will worsen the existing situation in the not too far future.