Investigation of effective factors on constructional infraction in small towns (Case Study: Babolsar)

1. Nowadays, cities are complex environment under the influence of economic, social and political forces. These forces shape and act in the cities through main players including formal forces such as citizens and developers and informal forces such as pressure forces. City environment is historically shaped by these forces depending on socio-political structure of the city. Therefore, cities are always faced with paradoxical forces and values in their sustainable urban development that sometimes got stuck between personal benefits and public gains. In sustainable urban development, the quality of life in city’s environment is considered as the central issue and is defined within protecting ecosystems. This is in a way that guarantees the continuity of citizens’ life with social growth and economic and environmental well-being of human settlements and their interactions with all the residents by preserving sustainable urban environment. The main point of the sustainable development theory is its logical and reasonable attention to relations between elements and constituents of development which leads to preservation and duration of development. In other words, the sustainable urban development regards the five basic indices involving economy, human society and culture, anatomical (physical) environment and management, and administrative practices. Therefore, it is necessary to take social and economic issues into consideration along with environmental, administrative and physical matters. In this regard, ‘Liwot’ argues that much have been neglected to understand the reciprocal effects of processes of sustainable urban development as a type of a complete system. Then, for evaluating the development of urban sustainability, it is required to regard all issues as an integrated matter in a way that all elements and their interrelations and interactions are considered. So, more reliable results are those which are closer to the common parts of these factors. However, an important point is that what is considered as the core element in the sustainable approach and underlies other issues is reasonable land use and having a sustainable plan for it. This is due to the fact that land use is the heart of sustainable discourse. Actually, planning and sustainable management of land use at the beginning of the 21st century is an immediate necessity because of population growth and economic activities leading to increasing pressure on the earth. Therefore, to know and resolve the difficulties in urban land use management, verifying the stability in urban land use is the indispensable point for urban decision-makers. Under the present circumstances, in metropolises and cities like Tehran, if the present urban zones and the future ones continue to change without considering economic, social, managing and environmental needs, the future problems will be inevitable. Reaching sustainable development is the main issue in cities. In order to reach urban sustainable development in geographical environment, the plans and acts of urban institutions should be proportional to their ecologic structure. Therefore, in order for sustainable urban management, urban managers are faced with a variety of problems and containments. One of them is constructional infraction which has great influence on urban physical structure. These infractions are different depending on the above forces. In other words, some forces affected urban management efforts intensively. These forces following their benefits have constructional infraction and break urban development rules while urban management has nothing to do with. This research aims to survey this kind of urban pathology in the field of constructional infraction in a small town of Iran, Babolsar. 2. In general, there are two kinds of methodology in urban issues research; dedicational research and analogical one. Despite of the controversial issues about the fact that historically dedicational research could not help advance the science in a variety of fields, in most of the researches these two approaches has been applied. In this article, we attempt to investigate constructional infraction in the city of Babolsar using GIS application in north of Iran. This software is the most useful tools for urban planners in the field of city information analysis such as land use and qualitative maps. Planners have always been involved in developing the communities everyone would want to call home. Originally, this meant designing and maintaining cities and counties through land use regulation and infrastructure support. Thus, using this powerful tool, we produced a variety of thematic maps in order to show spatial division of city and spatial pattern of constructional infraction. We are also going to find out how urban managers could face with these kinds of infractions through real urban policies. Based on the research goal, this research methodology is analytical-descriptive and it has been done using geographic information systems. In doing so, the city is divided into four sections and whole of infractions have been extracted based on the sections. In the next step, the needed table and maps are prepared and have been used. 3. Results show that the main part of Babolsar infractions is in residential land use where it took place in all four divisions of the city. In searching for the main reasons of this situation, we found that the current laws are suffering from inefficiency and lack of supervision system. Finally, establishment of supervision and searching and implementing sustainable and healthy municipalities are among effective solutions. 4. We have tried to clarify one of the main problems in urban spaces, constructional infraction, which has directly affected quality of life of citizens in many cities. This problem has multiple sources in city where many forces playing different roles depending on their power and dominance. Therefore, there are many socio-political and economic forces in the city that play a plenty of roles depending on the fact that which has more power source. Urban managers and planners in such a confusing and complicated atmosphere are faced with hard procedures and processes which their conduction need appropriate and exact approaches. In this article, the results show that main reasons for constructional infraction are domestic laws, disintegration of urban managements, lack of facilities for urban poor classes and lack of night monitoring system. In order to achieve a sustainable path, some strategies have also been proposed as following: paying attention to low-income groups in urban development plans, decreasing dependency on constructional infraction incomes and so on.