چكيده به لاتين
According to regional development policies, decentralization of the centralized regions of the country as a macro targeting has been considered by urban and regional planners. Decentralization is seen as a tool to improve local government performance, increase regional balance, improve economic and managerial efficiency and effectiveness, increase the authority of local government to provide higher quality services and facilitate equitable distribution of capital between regions, and improve access to services and infrastructure such as education, health, etc. In Iran, after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, political-administrative, financial-economic, and physical decentralization were considered as strategic policies for the development of the provinces of the country, and with the establishment of the Planning and Development Council of the provinces, the basic steps were taken to decentralize in Iran. But the issue of decentralization is still unresolved in urban planning issues.
In this regard, in this study, three objectives were adopted, including explaining and measuring the spatial factors affecting decentralization in the country, leveling settlements based on the degree of concentration, and presenting a proposed operational model for the decentralization of centralized provinces. The present study is applied research, and according to the studied components, its approach is descriptive-analytical. The territory of the research area is all 31 provinces of the country. In this study, to identify the factors affecting decentralization in Iran and to develop a theoretical framework, the library-documentary method was used. To achieve the goals, 49 indicators in 5 categories of population, employment, income, expenses, and services were used. Therefore, the structural equation modeling method with partial least squares approach and Smart PLS software was used to measure decentralization factors. The cluster analysis method and TOPSIS technique using SPSS and Excel software were used to level the provinces. The results indicate that there is a significant relationship between population, services, income, and cost. The results show that the most important decentralization factor from the centralized regions of the country is employment, services, income, and cost, respectively. Also, the ranking of settlements shows that out of 31 provinces of the country, one province was very centralized, one was a centralized province, 14 provinces were relatively decentralized, and 15 provinces were decentralized. Therefore, the model governing the country's space organization has followed the center-periphery model, so that as we move away from the center of the country, the concentration of the country's provinces decreases, and decentralized provinces are located in the peripheral and the border areas.
