Assessment and evaluation of the sustainability in the informal settlements using ecological footprint model Case Study: Upper Abbas Abad District of Sanandaj City

One of the urban non-sustainable development reasons, especially in developing countries, is a kind of settlement or a certain issue known as informal settlments, where require special measures to manage the current situation and to prevent their spread in the future. Introducing urban sustainable development in 1980s and necessity to consider all of the urban dimensions (including environmental, economical, and social) as the foundations of the urban sustainable development, the study of informal settlements entered a new phase concerning with assessing the sustainability level in such settlements . The idea of sustainable development resulted in emerging modern applied practices and methods of new applications in order to assess the environmental impacts to date since 1990s. The analysis of ecological footprint is one of the indicators attracted more attention in academic, political and education. Ecological footprint is an index, which evaluates the energy and materials used in a city, region or country so that the population and industrial processes pressure on the ecosystem could be estimated. Sanandaj, like other urban areas in the country facing a lot of issues of 1950s and 1960s including massive rural-urban migration, rural-urban imbalances, rapid urban development and so on has experienced the formation of major informal settings such as Abbas Abad, Kani Koozaleh, Ghafoor, Taqutaquan, etc. Hence, we adopted a descriptive-analytical method with emphasis on literature review and field works to assess the sustainability level in Abbas Abad District, Sanandaj (Iran) as one of the informal neighborhoods. For this purpose, we used the ecological footprint model. Our findings revealed that the total ecological footprint in this district was 74560.551 ha indicating 3.808 ha per capita-considering its population of 19578 persons in 2012.