Assessing the flexibility of urban spatial structure against the changes of the streets network (case study: city of Sari)

Streets network is one of the main factors in creating cities' spatial structure. The purpose of preparing development plans by urban planners in addition to solving the existing problems is to depict a desirable and optimal future for cities. Spatial structure at the macro level is an appropriate tool in this regard. So, paying attention to policies, macro-physical and functional goals of the city is inevitable because a change into the urban spatial structure will be a change into policies and future development goals of the city. The thing that the legislator had seen in the article 5 of the law establishing the Supreme Council of Urban Planning and Architecture of Iran, and However, there is a lack of research on measuring the flexibility of urban development plans as a result of enacting urban policies. So the research aims to assess the changes of Sari’s spatial structure, affected by the decisions of the Article 5 Commission of the Supreme Council of Urban Planning and Architecture of Iran, and the degree of flexibility of the spatial structure of this city, as the center of one of the most important provinces of Iran, which is under pressure from the changes in population and activity that is under pressure from various forces against changes related to the network of passages. Thus, at first, the spatial structure of the city has been extracted from the outputs of the plan with an emphasis on the roads, and then its tolerance threshold is determined based on the designed patterns. Also in this research, by having information before and after applying the opinions of the Article 5 Commission on the city, specifically on the roads, the McNemar test has been used to check the significance of the changes. The results of the test indicate that out of 193 roads in the city, divided into 5 categories after the changes of Article 5 Commission, 32 roads with discrepancies and 161 roads remained without discrepancies, and the amount of chi-square obtained from the test is 2.89.