Typology of spatial patterns of sprawl in central city region of Mazandaran

Residential constructions with or even without plan have led to the expansion of cities and their peripheral areas into the agricultural lands of central city-region of Mazandaran province. The economic capacity of this region is based on the capacity of agricultural development. To preserve the national capital, a specific plan should be adopted to prevent the increasing destruction of the lands and the development of the buildings constructed on these lands. The current capacity has already been completely forgotten and undergone changes or even widespread degradation due to the development of the land and housing market. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the typology of spatial patterns of sprawl in central city-region of Mazandaran province. The research method is quantitative and the main data is summarized in terms of demographic and physical-spatial components to achieve the research objectives. The annual data on the population of rural and urban areas in the Statistical Yearbooks of Mazandaran Province from 1986 to 2016 was consulted to obtain demographic data. Physical-spatial data includes the data related to built-up lands during 1986-2016 (based on Landsat images and 1:25000 map of Mazandaran province development) and construction density in the study period. Other data was obtained from statistical and mathematical processing of demographic and physical-spatial data using GIS, ESRI, and the urban growth model. Then, the Kriging Estimator was used for the typology of macro-scale spatial models. Also, the urban growth form (UGF) was used for micro-scale spatial patterns. This model can identify 3 main types of sprawl, including linear, infill and leap-frog patterns, based on the development process perspective. The results of the research indicate that urban sprawl has increased on the macro scale during the studied period. In this sense, the spatial pattern in 1986 was focused on only three main urban centers with a sprawl in their peripheral lands, especially in the city of Sari. However, in 1996, due to the transformation of some rural centers into urban areas and the trend of development in the lands around urban centers, concentration in Babol increased, but only some parts of the lands of Babol and Qaemshahr underwent the sprawl phenomenon. This was the case up to 2006, but in 2016, along with the concentration of development in urban, peri-urban and rural lands, the sprawl phenomenon intensified with increasing values of the related variables. On the other hand, spatial patterns of sprawl from 1986 to 1996 (including intervals of 1986-1996 and 1996-2006) were linear on a micro scale, a line with an upward trend due to the development around the boundaries of urban settlements (peri-urban lands). However, in the period from 1986 to 1996, sprawled development tended to have an infill pattern, indicating the emergence of a combination of linear and infill patterns. In the period from 2006 to 2016, the spatial pattern of growth was also an infilled one. It should be noted that, in a separate study of urban and rural settlements of the studied city-region, different results were observed in urban lands. Thus, it can be concluded that the sprawl pattern in urban lands often follows a dispersed and linear pattern, while rural settlements have a linear and infill pattern. The sprawl pattern in the central city-region of Mazandaran has evolved as a result of the development of rural lands. Residential constructions with or even without plan have led to the expansion of cities and their peripheral areas into the agricultural lands of central city-region of Mazandaran province. The economic capacity of this region is based on the capacity of agricultural development. To preserve the national capital, a specific plan should be adopted to prevent the increasing destruction of the lands and the development of the buildings constructed on these lands. The current capacity has already been completely forgotten and undergone changes or even widespread degradation due to the development of the land and housing market. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the typology of spatial patterns of sprawl in central city-region of Mazandaran province. The research method is quantitative and the main data is summarized in terms of demographic and physical-spatial components to achieve the research objectives.