Mohammad Soleimani’s research while affiliated with Kharazmi University and other places

Quick urban growth and its horizontal expansion in Iran maybe more severe than most developed and developing countries. This process of urbanization has deprived most historical cities of Iran of unified urban structure and has faced them with specific problems in balanced development. in addition, many lands, land uses, old and deteriorated urban textures remain undeveloped due to the unsystematic and hasty nature of the development, and now are considered as problematic urban textures. This research seeks to conduct a “feasibility study on the fields of action in infill development of the city of Saqqez in order to attain a sustainable urban development and identifying the existing and latent capacities of the urban textures in balanced physical development”. The present research mainly employs a cognitive view in a descriptive-analytical framework. The required data were gathered by means of both documentary-library and field research. Also the Arc GIS, Google Earth, Global Mapper softwares were applied for extracting and analysis of infill development areas. the studies have shown that, this city has got reasonable capacities for infill development so that Brownfield lands of Saqqez cover an area equal to 545.4 acres, 493.9 acres of which is covered with barren lands and 51/5 acres with inefficient land use (renewable). The area covered by deteriorated urban textures (deteriorated texture: central, medial and marginal) is overall 274/8 acres which includes 9512 residential blocks. This city has about 820 acres of area for practicing infill development which could be put into effective use and also to stop the horizontal urban growth. In general, with regard to all the regulations and considerations, and according to the proposed density by Supreme Council of Planning and Architecture, Brownfield lands could cover 43632 people and deteriorated urban textures (with regard to residential blocks of the textures and the compressional zone of the detailed plan) could do with 43555 people; therefore the infill urban development zones of Saqqez have the capacity to receive and accommodate 87187 people in addition to the existing population. Key word: urban sprawl, smart growth, infill development, deteriorated urban textures, city of Saqqez.

Quality of life (QoL) is being considered as one of the fundamental concepts in contemporary era. It tries to assess the level of general welfare of the communities. Urban transitional neighborhoods possess specific situation and as a result present distinctive QoL. The major objective of this study is to identify and measure the QoL dimensions in urban transitional neighborhoods using both objective and subjective indices pertaining to Darvazeshemiran neighborhood of Tehran. In order to accomplish this and gather needed data, 244 questionnaires were distributed among Darvazeshemiran's residents. This study suggests that there exists low level of QoL in the study area. That is 64.3 % of the residents were dissatisfied with the prevailing level of QoL. This in turn is associated with the transitional nature of this neighborhood. The residents were strongly dissatisfied with regard to the environmental qualification as opposed to accessibility status. Furthermore, this study identified five objective factors respectively regarding QoL. There exists low correlation between subjective and objective dimensions. That demands simultaneous consideration of both objective and subjective dimensions. It is argued that individual treatments of each could not accurately represent the QoL of residents.