Analysis of the Urban Land Use Changes through Commission Act-Five Decisions (Case of Rasht)

Commission Act-Five was established on early 1970s as a legal reference for flexible implementation of master and detailed plans in Iran. Based on this bylaw, all changes in urban land uses within the city boundaries should be approved through decisions made by this Commission. This paper tries to evaluate the role of Commission Act-Five’s decisions in the City of Rasht on urban lands over a ten-year period from 1997 to 2006. The main data utilized in this study was based on the documents obtained from the secretariat of the Commission Act-Five in Rasht. For data analysis a number of statistical methods such as correlation, the mean and percentage changes have been applied. The main findings of the study include the following: The number of applications for land use changes in Rasht has considerably been increased over the study period. Among different activities, the residential and commercial uses have had the biggest gains, but, lands related to public services such as green space, education and sport uses have faced the highest levels of reductions. The number of construction and residential unit permits issued by municipality was highly correlated with the number of applications and volume of urban land use change in the City of Rasht.