Analysis of the effects of urban sprawl on Social Capital Case Study: City Maragheh

The scattered growth of cities, besides the negative environmental and economic impacts, has high societal costs, with expanding and distancing urban neighborhoods from the city center and the formation of urban suburbs more and more. The first goal of this study is to analyze the urban dispersal effect on social capital of Maragheh township. The second goal is to compare the results of multivariate regression with geographical weight regression. The present study consists of three stages: urban dispersion, social capital survey of neighborhoods, and finally, measuring the impact of dispersed indicators on the amount of social capital in urban areas. The number of urban dispersal indicators was 6, and the number of social capital indicators in 5 main factors and 39 sub-indicators. The research method is descriptive-analytical, which has been used for surveying and documentary methods. Data gathering of dispersed indicators by studying the comprehensive city-specific layout developed using ArcGIS software. Social capital information was collected through 383 questionnaires. For data analysis, multivariate regression and geographic weight regression have been used. The results of the study show that the results of multivariate regression are less reliable than geographic weight regression considering the nature of spatial data.