Identifying the factors affecting the land Readjustment Process in Urban Distressed Areas (Case study: Shiraz City)

In recent decades, the increasing growth of cities has transformed agricultural lands and increased the costs of urban services, leading to urban expansion. Moreover, the cities are faced with problems such as the deterioration of urban neighborhoods and suburbs due to people’s lack of willingness to live in these neighborhoods, decline in investment in old neighborhoods, reduction of capacity, and decline in the quality of life. With 1,700 hectares of distressed areas, the city of Shiraz, Iran is no exception, and suffers the same problem. It is possible to solve such issues through urban growth management policies. One of these policies is Land Readjustment (LR). It is necessary to identify and classify the legal, institutional, economic, social, and local factors influencing land readjustment in order to provide effective, sufficient urban generation. Thus, this study aimed to identify the key factors influencing the land readjustment process in distressed areas and to examine the cause-and-effect relations through Interpretative Structural Model in order to identify the most important variables in the implementation process. This could be a guide for urban management to achieve infill development by stimulating and implementing the most important variables and, consequently, increasing the possibility of the entire land readjustment project.

Theoretical Framework

Land readjustment is a technique used for management of urban development, according to which a number of irregular plots of land are divided into more regular plots after consolidation with proper planning, and sections including ones used for provision of public services are also divided between the original owners for construction purposes. In this method, the lines of ownership are changed for consolidation, division, and replacement of land areas for the purpose of creation or improvement of urban facilities and public services. Rather than forced to provide the required land, the owners are invited to negotiations for consolidation of their lands to provide land for services.

The present research could be categorized as an applied descriptive-analytical study. Due to the complexity of the relationships, the MicMac software was used to analyze the driving and dependent forces. In this method, the factors are placed in an n * n matrix and filled with numbers 0, 1, 2, and 3 based on expert opinions, and are considered as the basis for further analysis. For this purpose, indicators were extracted from the theoretical framework of the research as a 22 * ​​22 matrix and provided to seventeen urban experts in Shiraz as a two-stage Delphi questionnaire.

In the case of unwillingness to participate, two variables were considered as increasing system risk: definition of the laws concerning the residents and owners’ protests pertaining to the urban design before, during, and after its implementation and enactment of the laws concerning the payment of the probable indemnity to the residents. This was because any legislation could be an obstacle in the system, decreasing the owners’ and residents’ partnership tendency, without fair consideration of their interests.The major organizational-institutional variables played an important role in the implementation of land readjustment, and influenced the other variables.  These included partnership of the local government through intermediary and facilitating institutions, law-abiding local governments, and concern for individual and social justice. This is because these variables actually link the social variables to the executable ones, and function as an interface to provide a framework for correct implementation to meet people’s needs.Furthermore, partnership of the local government through intermediary and facilitating institutions is one of the most effective, most impressive variables, which plays a key, strategic role.

The findings reveal that the key to implementation of land readjustment in distressed areas and to solve their problems is to create an intermediary institution to listen to the people’s demands and opinions. Other strategic variables involved in land readjustment in distressed areas include concern for individual and social justice in the local government, strategic perspective and flexibility of the local government, definition of the tangible, approachable objectives, and appropriate assessment of land price before and after the execution.Therefore, it is necessary to constantly examine the variables during both design and implementation of land readjustment in a distressed area. All these variables are either directly related to or applied by the local government, indicating the importance of city authorities’ policy-making and employment of experienced workforce.It is also important for the basic requirements according to the existing facts to select appropriate sites and set tangible goals, because the process would stop as a result of a lack of concern for the facts.