Romanian Review of Regional Studies (Dec 2014)
Strategic Planning and Urban Development by Using the SWOT Analysis. The Case of Urmia City
Abstract
A strategic planning is an important tool to guide the urban planning. It will help maintain a focused, long-term vision of the urban mission and purpose, and aid decisions about the urban development. In reality review and understanding of urban development, its strengths and weaknesses are of major importance in the strategic planning. Today, awareness of strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats are a necessity for urban development plans and programs. Urmia City, despite being rich in natural and human resources, it faces difficulties in terms of unsustainable development due to the lack of proper utilization of resources and environmental degradation of agricultural land suitable for industrial and residential land uses. The aim of the current research is to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in Urmia city. This study is applied and it utilizes both descriptive and analytical methods, but also the AHP and SWOT methods. The result of the study indicates that, for the development of Urmia City, the overcoming strategy has the maximum score (4.07), whereas the negatives control strategy has the minimum score (1.77). Therefore, Urmia City should make the maximum use of strengths and opportunities in order to reduce weaknesses and threats.
