Abolfazl Dehghanmongabadi - Faculty of Architectural Engineering and Urbanism, Shahrood University of Technology (SUT), Shahrood, Iran

The rapid growth of the population throughout the world and its concentration in urban settlements is one of the greatest challenges of the current century. The name of this moving of population from rural to urban environments is urbanization. The urban development form is one of the main concerns of urban planners and designers, which directly affects the quality of life in urban settlements. Accordingly, a deeper understanding of urban development forms is indispensable towards achieving more aspects of sustainability inside urban settlements and provide healthy and livable urban environments. In this way, scholars identified several types of sustainable urban forms, the most popular of them is the compact form. The main purpose of this research is concentrated to interpret and assess compact development approach for achieving more sustainable urban settlements. The methodology of the research is centered on qualitative techniques through a narrative literature review based on published studies and exiting documents. The urban development and strategies applied to Amsterdam city discussed in this study. Consequently, the research would express the characteristics of compact development form and emphasize compact form as the most important sustainable urban form towards decline the negative impacts of unsustainable urban development that happened worldwide.

Sustainability, urban settlements, sustainable urban forms, urban compact form,