The Environmental Quality of City and Urban Sprawl in Babolsar

The dominant form of cities has been urban sprawl worldwide which created multi socio-economic and environmental problems. Critics believe that this form of urban growth is the most unsustainable expansion of cities resulted from Intensive use of private cars and haphazard urban land use planning. The issue dictated planners to seek for a more sustain and healthy urban form which could guarantee the balanced growth of cities, and so the compact city was one the most defended form for the contemporary urbanism. Now the main question was that which one of urban form i.e. compact or sprawls provide better quality of life? There are many issues which should be considered in first place and then to determine the best option for urban growth. Initially, the level life satisfaction is related to different socio-economic status and the mode of transportation of urban residents and other factors. Urban sprawl common in USA, Australian and Canada is different with the same phenomena in Iran and the majority of developing countries. The Mega polises of Tehran, Mashhad, Tabriz and others are the results of an inefficient economic development triggered urban-biased and therefore led to the huge rural- urban migration towards the urban fringes where pulls most of the local municipalities financial resources and con not coined as American dream. This paper tries to use objective indicators to analysis the unbalanced growth of Babolsar city which now threatened the quality of life and its environment. The research applied Entropy method and density to define the city form and also tests of T and F accompanied with SPPS to measure environmental quality. The main hypotheses of the research are based as on two alternatives: First, it seems that there is a meaningful relation between the city imbalanced growth and the quality of life. Second, it seems that the quality of life in neighborhoods is lower in unbalanced areas of the city compared to the balanced ones.