Inner texture of cities: A potentiality to move toward the compact city pattern (Case study: Bojnord City) [

In the late decades of the 20th century, urban planners, due to the environmental worries arising from modernist urbanism looked for paradigms of new sustainable development regarding ideal city forms, since urban sprawl and horizontal expanse of cities lead to different socio–economic and structural disorders; therefore, during the recent decades, planners who are unanimously heading for sustainabledevelopment, have been taking different city forms into consideration, one of which being city compact form or compact city which results in a balanced social atmosphere and decreases energy consumption.This study, aiming at comparing the existing city textures and identifying the structural characteristics of each (especially the middle texture) in the city of Bojnord, and based on a descriptive method and using the SWOT technique, shows that Bojnord city, under the influence of various economic, social and historical factors, has consequently enjoyed three textures: ancient, middle and external, each of which providing some certain facilities and limitations to achieve the goal of a sustainable city.results, withinframework smart cities theory, shows that the inner texture of Bojnord, compared with the problematic ancient texture and the informal settlements in the external texture has a higher potentiality for combining mix-land uses and compressing the city.It should be noted that proper planning can be a good point to move toward sustainablecity development.