A Comparative Evaluation of the Location and Development of Urban Centers in Mazandaran Province Through Ecological Approach

Suitable locating and establishment of cities has a great importance in preventing the environmental crisis and also sustainable and durable use of resources of the region. The aim objective of this study is to assess the ecological potency of Mazandaran Province and comparing it with the location and development of the existing towns. To this end, this study has been done with descriptive - analytic method and by using geographical information systems (GIS).For this purpose, at first, the maps were digitalized in GIS environment and various required information layers including ground material, the ground situation and form, elevation from sea level, slope, slopes direction, isohyets and isothermal areas, relative humidity, water resources and vegetable cover have been used. Then they were turned into a suitable format for running the model. To evaluate the ecological potency of urban development and to integrate information layers, weighted index method was used as a result of which map of the land proportion for the establishment and development of cities was obtained. The results show that the areas with proper potency for urban development, after removing protected and forest areas, includes only 22/75 percent of the study area. Also comparison of the locations of the cities and the total development scores obtained showed that, 42 cities out of 51 cities in the province are in suitable conditions. Comparison of the total ecological criteria scores with the cities and their populations shows that there is a direct but weak relationship between suitable establishment of cities and their development.