Measuring settlement sustainability in rural areas (Case study: rural area of Baruq, West Azarbaijan)

At present, sustainability as a clear goal is at the heart of global developments. Territorial sustainable development depends on the sustainability of rural system as a constituent sub-system of a territorial system. Sustainability of rural areas in different dimensions can have an effective role in regional and national development. The current research attempts to recognize and account for the spatial capabilities and limitations of rural settlements in Baruq within the framework of sustainable development. This research is a practical study with a descriptive methodology. The research statistical population includes 70 residential villages in Baruq are, of them thirty-two villages were selected through stratified sampling and based on four criteria of sustainable development. Field and document data were collected to answer the research questions. The results indicate that these villages are weak in terms of sustainability. Moreover, investigating the four aspects of sustainability has shown that each of the aspects (i.e., environmental-ecological, physicalspatial, social, and economic) are in a weak sustainable condition; the economic aspect suffers most from the weakest condition. The level of sustainability in the villages reveals that around 43 per cent of the settlements are unsustainably strong, 25 per cent unsustainably weak, 25 per cent sustainably weak, and only 6 per cent are sustainably strong. The sustainability of the villages decreases physicallyspatially from the west to the east of the district. That is to say, mountainous villages are less sustainable than the villages in the plains or other less mountainous areas. Sustainable and slightly sustainable villages lie in the west or in the plain. It shows that sustainable spatial pattern is a cluster. The results thus predict the highest role of social factors (R2 = 0.392) and a low role for environmentalecological factors (R2 = 0.186) in the unsustainability of the rural settlements. Economic and physical-spatial factors predict around 0.338 and 0.324 of the unsustainability in rural settlements.