A study on rural housing zones in rural settlements of Iran interact with environmental factors

Providing appropriate rural housing in the country is a critical and ever- increasing demand. Solving current problems, in the rural housing prospects of the country requires essential research and planning. The first step in any type of planning towards improving or rehabilitation of rural housing conditions in Iran demands comprehensive and macro level information and an overall correct classification in the territorial rural geographic zone of the country. This paper has been pursuing to introduce geographical district classification (or territorial zoning) across the country (i.e. the rural settlements network) in order to identify zones in which similar types of rural housing are located.The classification intends to recognize and highlight rural settlement zones in terms of district classification of similar spatial areas and similar types of rural housing. This research study has been pursuing the following - Identification of the basic (or lead) housing formation “types” across territorial zone of the country, cognition of the occurrence central point and the authority area of each major “housing type” and explaining how each of these types interact with environmental factors. - Determination of the role of each geographic, natural, climatic, social, economic, political, and … factors on formation of indigenous housing across territorial rural geography of the country. In line with the above two objectives, the following basic information has also been formulated and prepared that may be mentioned as notable achievements of the plan: - Brief and harmonized introduction of “transformed types” emerged from “basic types” and classified by province. This part of the work has uniformly collected the country’s available rural housing typology information from all provinces and classified in a predefined structure: - Information layered map of all parameters influencing rural housing formation, classified by different provinces - Basic ethnical zoning map of the country, in accordance with linguistic information Rural housing in Iranian territorial zones is classified into eight “lead types”, with “transformed types” located within each “lead types”. Since no clear and definite boundary can be defined to breakdown or classify “types”, in many cases, distinct boundaries have not been defined. This discussion focuses on “basic types”’ formation center (or concentration point) and on spectral study of their area of authority. Accordingly, rural housing formation zones of the basic (or lead) “types’” in Iran are as follows: Zone 1: The Oman Sea and the Persian Gulf littoral Zone 2: Caspian Sea fringes Zone 3: Mountainous Kurdish settling areas of West Zone 4: Azari settling areas in North West Zone 5: Mid Alborz district and eastern Zagros plains Zone 6: Settled Nomads and permanent residents of the western Zagros foothills Zone 7: Central and eastern plains of Iran Zone 8: Central highlands and plains in the central and eastern mountainous fringe areas In continue, effective environmental factors in rural housing in identified zones have been studied.Sstudies show that somefactorshave adecisiverole, based on whichthehousing formationis up built. The factors determinethehousing formation “types”, in a monopolistic appearance forsome “types”.