A Comparative Study of Urban Services in Cities of Mazandaran Province

One of the most important consequences of the rapid growth of urbanization and physical development of the cities in recent decades has been the disintegrated distribution of urban service centers, paving the way for social inequality in accessing them. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to compare and rank the cities of Mazandaran Province as one of the densest regions of the country, in terms of access to urban services. In this study, using statistical sources of Mazandaran Province and library studies, twenty-two levels of cities of Mazandaran Province were ranked in terms of access to twelve components selected from the urban services. In this regard, the data of the National Statistics Organization and the Organization of Management and Planning of Mazandaran Province have been used to compare the cities to each other after determining their weight using the feature index and Sturgess’ model in VP software. The results show that there is a huge difference between the cities of this province in terms of net output current values of the studied indicators, so that the cities of Miandorood and Amol with -0.7460 and 0.9087, respectively, are the least and the most prosperous cities of Mazandaran in terms of access to the twenty-two components.