The Analysis and Evaluation of the Role of Spatial Components in the Spatial Arrangement of Population Centers in Sirjan Basin

Some components in natural places such as the shores of seas and lakes, river banks and glacial valleys have special structures whose potentials in morphology have attracted people to create social configuration. Discovering the distribution patterns and the arrangement of these centers determines the rules governing the environment. For this reason, this research tried to analyze and evaluate the role of spatial components in the arrangement of population centers in Sirjan basin. The phenomenological method and the space analysis technique were used to identify the natural developments that caused the emergence of natural history and geomorphic heritage in the studied area. Then the rules governing the arrangement of settlements in the study area were extracted. The results showed that two geographical identities, glacial and lake, define the space syntax logic of the settlements in the study area. In the Land Context of Sirjan Old Lake, the arrangement of settlements is affected by lake terraces and the law of size-distance, so that the density of population centers on the terraces, especially the third and fourth terraces, which are more far from the center of the lake, increases significantly. On the one hand, as we move from the center of the lake to the higher terraces, larger population centers are created with more people. On the other hand, permanent villages were formed at the intersection of ice sheets with a thermal surface (6°C), i.e., the ice–water equilibrium line. Moreover, the space syntax of the settlements above the ice-water equilibrium line, which are mainly non-permanent and summer population centers, is in accordance with the glacial valleys and the distribution of the ice sheets of the past.