An overview of the concepts of transition, transformation and changes in the urban environment and their relationship with each other

Urban environmental changes, providing increasingly favorable living conditions in cities, are a permanent, continuous and long-term process with broad and long-lasting effects on the development of cities. In order to create a new context and meaning, cities are subject to constant transformations, changes, and ultimately transitions to another structure, either voluntarily or non-voluntarily. But what is not clear in the concepts of transition, transformation and change is their conceptuality and position and the relationship between them, as well as types, dimensions and goals of each of them; so that the concepts are used interchangeably in many studies. Therefore, revising and introducing the role of each component of urban transition, transformation, and changes, as well as their impact on each other can be considered as the main purpose of the study. Accordingly, this paper examines the views and perspectives of the experts in this field, using the descriptive method and content analysis, and inferring applied results based on a review of related literature. Furthermore, in order to achieve the findings, the meta-synthesis method has been used as a kind of meta-analyses method. As a result, the positions of each of the concepts of urban transformation, transition and changes and the differences between them, as well as different kinds of urban changes and their relationships with each other have been found in this study. In the end, it can be expressed that transition creates various urban changes in various physical, economic, social, political and environmental dimensions, which leads to broad visible and invisible urban changes in considered dimensions. Thus, urban changes could be a dynamic and integral part of urban transition and transformation.