Assessment of the Management Challenges of Towns from the Influential Groups Viewpoint

Urban development in the world، particularly in developing countries، has adhered various issues and complications. Nascent rise of towns، having urban-village nature is a phenomenon facing in many different countries including Iran. Role of towns in balancing regional development and life style in towns has resulted in attracting more attention in national and urban development policy-making in recent years. These towns with strengths and opportunities ahead are faced with many problems، especially in terms of financial management. Towns، with urban trends، have village simplicity nature and basically have the rural economic and social relations. Having special nature، these towns have their own problems (such as unstable financial resources، manpower and technical weaknesses، etc.); hence، require special management. With a new look to the urban management in towns، this paper deals with identifying and to some extend analyzing towns facing management problems. For this purpose، we analyzed the management problems through studying available documents and data collection using questionnaire and face-to-face interview with mayors of some of the towns in Kermanshah، Hamedan، and Kurdistan Provinces. The information achieved from this study reveals that the main issue faced by urban management in towns is financial issues and shortage of stable financial resources، accelerated by problems such as improper manager selection، lack of using available opportunities (due to the economical and management weakness). Our results indicated that financial support and stable income for town as well as utilizing experiences of private sector are among the essential requirements of urban management in towns. Meanwhile، these towns should fix the problems in the field of human resources، technical and show serious attention to the capacity building in various areas. Although the limited financial resources are the main factor fueling to other problems such as infrastructure defects، and technical and human capacities، but comparing different towns shows that urban management and innovation of urban managers as a determinant factor play a critical role in reducing financial and material problems in towns. Nevertheless، towns have their own particular social and cultural characteristics، which may result in creating opportunities such as beneficiary of the available social capital، and threats such as ignoring the present regulations.