Urban form Analysis Based on Smart Growth Characteristics at Neighborhoods of 9th District in Mashhad Municipality

The purpose of this article is investigating the form of cities based on the new approach of urban smart growth and transect. Currently, the smart urban growth by using the transect method has been able to apply the environmental criteria and keep away from sprawl. The design is based on applying transect method in scale of neighborhoods within metropolis zone. In the zones of transect, different indexes of urban forms have defined clearly; furthermore are measurable and analyzable. The second purpose is determining degree of compatibility between urban characteristics within metropolis zone in one hand, and form-base codes of smart growth in the other hand. The case study of present research is selected due to having diversity of urban forms, different kinds of density, land-use and urban natural landscapes. For this diversity, 9th district in Mashhad metropolis was selected. The transect method has six separate zoning from T1 as the most natural and rural indexes, to T6 including most urban and dense indexes. The new method of Space Matrix for measuring the urban is used for transect zoning. By selecting a north- south crosscut in the considered district and exploiting the urban indexes, the Transect typology of each selected urban unit was determined by spacematrix method. Then, resulted indexes for each urban unit separately were assessed by multi-criteria decision-making matrixes(MCDM). Finaly by the hypothesis test part, with respect to compliance of more than 50% of 26 indexes of urban units of 9th district, it seems that direction of new urban regulation and models totally express avoiding sprawl and tending to ecologic approaches in the concepts of smart growth and urban form characteristics can analyzed.Â