Local Capacities Underlie Urban Sustainable Development: Coexistence of Poverty Reagents and Geographic Space (Case Study: Yazd city)

Despite the increasing internationally emphasis on planning and practice in developing local communities for poverty alleviation, the planning system of Iran has not only paied enough attention to the development of local communities and the mechanisms that such communities can deal with poverty, but also planners and decision makers have little information about the types and characteristics of those neighborhoods that are more interested in developing community-based activities. The participation of Yazd city folks in improving their residential environment in the past was a kind of empowerment in form of a skill by which they were prepared to take some greater social responsibilities. It was a ground for strengthening social life and strengthening local functions. But due to the problems caused by physical expansion of Yazd city in the last 40 years and migration of indigenous inhabitants from the old texture neighborhoods of city, there is no way to apply the past social interactions and the sense of previous solidarity in the future. Therefore, the proper understanding of this concept in relation to the development of Yazd city can be considered very important. The present study aims to build a capacity on the bases of sustainable development and to assess the effective factors or effective barriers of building capacity in Yazd city regarding two reagents of general poverty and space-location geographic. The statistical population of the present study includes all household heads of Yazd city, of them 500 people were selected as a sample using a simple random method. The inferential results derived from one-sample T-test indicated that in all four research capacity elements (physical-environmental, economic, socio-cultural, and political) with a significance level less than 0.05, the mean figure of capacity building in Yazd city was different from the expected one. It means that the upper and lower levels of the differences are less than zero. Therefore, it was showed that the average capacity building in sustainable development of Yazd city and its dimensions has a positive and significant effect. As a conclusion, it was confirmed that there is a meaningful relationship between the mechanism of establishment and planning of urban sustainable development and local capacities in Yazd city. Finally, some strategies are proposed to encourage the residents towards the local development of neighborhoods in order to approach the urban sustainable development.