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Investigating Financial Motivators and Demotivators of Urban Sprawl Through the Lens of Municipalities: A Case of the Qom Municipality, Iran

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Abstract

Some studies speak of the financial and economic benefits of urban sprawl indicating that there is little evidence that compact cities outside of high-income countries are more productive. Considering the contradictions, this research seeks to identify and analyze the financial factors driving or impeding urban sprawl in one of the Iranian large cities, Qom City. The results show that urban sprawl is a costly phenomenon for the municipality in the long term. However, urban officials have some incentives to encourage urban sprawl. The most significant advantage of urban sprawl is the increase in income from the sale of municipal (immovable) property. More than 50% of the municipality's revenues are provided from land and related developments and this increases the incentive to expand the city and the lack of control over the urban sprawl. Urban sprawl also imposes financial costs on the municipality, and the most significant financial obstacle is the increase in the costs of urban transportation and traffic improvement(26% on average up to 55% in some years). Iranian municipalities mainly rely on unsustainable revenue sources, and a large part of their revenues are provided through urban sprawl and its related revenue sources, threatening peripheral environments more than ever.

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Source: Iranian Statistics Center, 2016, Drawing

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Data Availability

The data sets are available for the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. The related table is not included due to the journal’s limitations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Urban Planning, Faculty of Humanities, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

    Mehran Hajilou, Abolfazl Meshkini & Safar Ghaedrahmati

  2. Department of Management and Accounting, Faculty of Humanities, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

    Mohammad Mirehei

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Contributions

Mehran Hajilou: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing- Original draft, Writing—Review & Editing, Visualization Abolfazl Meshkini: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing—Review & Editing, Supervision Safar Ghaedrahmati: Methodology, Writing—Review & Editing, Supervision Mohammad Mirehei: Methodology, Writing—Review & Editing, Supervision.

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Correspondence to Abolfazl Meshkini.

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Hajilou, M., Meshkini, A., Ghaedrahmati, S. et al. Investigating Financial Motivators and Demotivators of Urban Sprawl Through the Lens of Municipalities: A Case of the Qom Municipality, Iran. Appl. Spatial Analysis (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-024-09591-w

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