Investigating Factors Affecting the Urban Growth Using F’ANP Model (Case Study: Bojnoord City)

When cities grow rapidly due to various factors such as changing economic, political, or social roles, they undergo many changes in their spatial structure. This phenomenon, especially in recent decades because of the uncontrolled growth of urban population and increasing migration to cities, is more visible in the cities of Iran compared with the past. In this process, cities are affected by multifaceted factors of urban growth, and in a short time, natural areas become urban lands. Meanwhile, some factors have a greater impact on the shape and extent of these changesincluding, population growth rate, urban road network, land usage change, government policies, and market trends. The occurrence of urban growth and its consequences have wide dimensions.The increase of medium and large cities and the spatial impact of urban growth on the surrounding lands are some of the important issues in the analysis of current urban issues. There is not any attention to the unplanned growth of these cities on the near horizon, which will lead to the transformation of medium-sized cities into large cities. Therefore, studying urban growth and explaining the factors, affecting help to identify and understand the process of urban development and test existing urban theories. The purpose of this article is to identify these factors and assessing the amount of impact of each of them in the process of urban growth by consideringBojnoord samples that had significant growth in recent years. In this regard, by reviewing the theoretical concepts related to urban growth, the factors affecting urban developmentwere codified, so asto be used as a framework for the analysis of the factors influencing the growth of Bojnoord.Then quantitatively is ratedwith the help of GIS and measurable relevant functions layers. Some of the most important factors are; population density, road density, number of amenities, distance from the town center, the development of single-family homes, faults, slope, etc. Then, from among the various methods of measurement, and quantitative assessment F’ANP keeps all the capabilities of factor analysis because F’ANPmanages to use the capability of factor analysis in converting subjects to specified dimensions and determining the relationship between indicators. Since the relationship between these extracted dimensions is objective, no problems arising from subjective judgments, and there is no effect on the results of research. The results showed that the most important factors in the growth of Bojnoord City were; tendency to single-family homes and large-scale land, the distance from the city center, the net density of the population, accordance with the desire of the city, commercial density, number of amenities, roads and population density respectively. Therefore, "density factor" indicators can be considered as the most important factors in the growth of Bojnourd city. On the other hand, the spatial study of these factors in the map of Bojnourd shows that the greatest concentration of these factors has been in the northwest (towards Golestan) and northeast of the city (towards Mashhad) in Bojnourd, which ultimately leads to the spatial form of the continuous expansion of Bojnourd.