Reclassification of the Rural Settlements into Cities: A Systematic Review

In the process of reclassifying villages to cities, rural settlements undergo changes in various dimensions. Although this subject has been studied through various specialized fields, less research has been done to categorize and summarize the aspects of the subject in these studies so far. In this paper, the related research have been examined in order to classify the types of processes, approaches, factors and consequences identified as the result. For this aim, 77 studies were examined in terms of structure and content using the systematic review method, to come up with what and how the impact of reclassifying villages into cities are. The results of structural investigations showed that during the last 20 years, this topic has been of interest to researchers in different specialized fields from different countries. From the content analysis, five categories of information including the types of theories related to the process of village to city reclassification, the factors and impacts of this process, the scale of spatial organization in the process, and the types of criteria used in these research were examined. Based on this, the theories related to the process of reclassifying a village into a city can be divided into two categories: theories related to regional planning and theories to improve the organizational management of space. Factors affecting the process of reclassifying the village to the city can be divided into three categories: natural, political and planning factors. With respect to the impacts caused by reclassifying a village into a city, the impacts recognized in the studied research include sustainability, environment, built form, economy, society and culture. In the conducted research, the levels of spatial organization include three levels of micro (citywide), meso and macro (regional), and six criteria of population, settlement system, ecological, physical, economic and socio-cultural aspects have been analyzed. This research showed that despite the comprehensive changes in all dimensions of a village in the process of its reclassification into a city, the research conducted on the perceptual dimensions related to identity and the sense of place resulting from these changes has been less discussed and needs more attention.