Classifying and Evaluating the Regional Development of Golestan Province,Using TOPSIS Model

Regarding the necessity of regional integrated development, analyzing thedependency of human habitats in region-level, is the main duty in every planning.Optimal distribution of the population and distribution of socio – economicdevelopment procedure, is the ultimate goal of analyzing regional systems.Therefore, deprivation and inequality reduction is an important matter, due to itseconomic and social consequences and needs proper attention. In fact, to achievecomprehensive development and progress in the future; requires the recognition ofdifferent areas and regions. Using quantitative methods and criteria in order toclassify the habitats in spatial system of regions, in one hand leads to identifyingthe inequality level of habitat points, and on the other hand is a criterion to try forreducing and eliminating the inequality between them. The purpose of this paper isto identify the development level in the cities of Golestan province. Byinvestigating and analyzing the quantitative criteria in three economic, social andservices categories; which are extracted from the up to date statistics of statisticalalmanacs and by making use of TOPSIS model which is considered to be one of themulti-criteria methods of evaluation, it was concluded that due to the used criteria,there’s a large gap between the cities of Golestan province and an unequaldevelopment between them; the western cities, located between the capital city andMazandaran province, are relatively better developed. Therefore, the cities ofGorgan, Gonbad Kavoos and Maraveh Tappeh have the first three ranks,respectively and two cities of Maraveh Tappeh and Ghalish are among the mostdeprived cities and are placed in the bottom of the ranking

Keywords:

TOPSIS Model , Classifying , Evaluating the Regional Development , Golestan Province