جغرافیا و توسعه (Dec 2016)
Areas in Analysis the Phenomenon of City-region And its Conceptual Requirements for Urban Iran (Case study: Mashhad Metropolitan Region)
Abstract
Problems faced with the metropolitan in recent decades and the inability of municipal managers to solve these problems, draw the attention of theorists to a scale beyond the metropolis, i.e. was attracted to the region level. A new spatial global phenomena in the region, is a structure is interpreted as "city-region". The clear and exact meaning of this phenomenon has always been faced with confusion. So, the aim of this study was to explore the concept of city-region and also find the answer to this question that according to the requirements of the city-region's concept, can this term be used for metropolitan area of Iran (Mashhad metropolitan region) or not. Thus, firstly, different definitions of city-regions and the roles and functions assigned to it in the specialized literature have been reviewed. In this transition, the three main components of functional relationships, management relationship and global competitiveness were extracted and summarized. Comparative analysis of these components with the features of management and spatial planning system in Mashhad metropolitan suggests that only the functional relationship applies to metropolitan cities of this region. In fact, the feature of governmental – institutional integrity has not been observed in Mashhad metropolitan district on one hand and on the other hand, this district has not the required capacities for entering in to the discussions relevant with the world Competitiveness, therefore, it can be said that the Competitiveness feature at cross regional does not apply for Mashhad metropolitan district. Therefore, it is recommended to use the term of "metropolitan regions" instead of "city-region" in Iran.
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