Network Analysis of Key Problems and Practitioners in Isfahan City-Region Using Social Network Analysis

To meet the needs of residents, the city needs to interact with its surroundings as a resource-rich system. If the interaction become deficiency or weakened, the city's ability to meet the needs of residents will become also difficult. Meanwhile, municipalities as the main actor of urban management play a major role in communicating cities and solve these problems, so that these issues can play a common language among the actors of the city-region. The methodology of this research is descriptive-analytical and it is an applied research. The main objective of research is to achieve the most important issues and the most important actors in the Isfahan city-region (including Isfahan and ten neighboring cities). For this purpose, in the first step, by identifing of issues between Isfahan and ten neighboring cities, a problem statement has been formulated using the two paths 1:reviewing the texts of urban documents and programs and 2:conducting interviews (semi-structured) with urban managers and experts of mentioned citis. In the second step, the issues and problems of the cities analyzed, using the method of social networks analysis and the formating of three networks 1:"actors-problems", 2:"subject of problems-actors" and 3-"intra organizational actors-problems" and based on three indicators 1-"degree centrality", 2-"betweenness centrality" and 3-"closeness centrality". According to the findings of the analysis of the first network, the most important actor in order to solve the problems of the city-region of Isfahan is deputy of "Urban Planning and Architecture"; according to the second network, the most important subject of the problems of the city-region are "service weakness", "unauthorized construction" and "non-coordination of urban management"; and with regard to the third network, the most important intra organizational (municipality of Isfahan) actor, is the deputy of "Transportation and Traffic".