Pathology of new towns in Iran

In Iran, the policy of building new towns was proposed with the aim of decreasing demographic pressure on large cities during the late 1980s. Construction of new towns started and new urban problems and issues unfolded, after which different criticisms and suggestions for improvement were proposed. In this regard, the present article explains the reasons for the failure of new towns in Iran. This descriptive-analytic research takes advantage of documentary-secondary data collection method. Investigations show that due to temporary intense increase in the country’s population, widespread emigration from villages to cities and lower short term development capacity of cities compared to the population growth rate between 1961 and 1991, building new towns around many mother-cities of the country was not necessary. Yet, the main reason for the failure of these new towns in attracting population includes lack of a comprehensive plan to transfer industries from mother-cities to new towns, lack of an efficient public transportation system between mother-cities and new towns, uncertainty in predicting and grouping the population, economic situation and income of households in new towns, weakness in locating, lack of support from the government and other related organizations, the slower increasing trend of land price in new towns as compared to mother-cities, higher benefit of constructing residential units in mother-cities as compared to new towns, economic downturn and increasing inflation rate between 1990-2013, and purely physical attitude of urban planners in preparing the plans and neglecting people’s demands and needs.