Urban Growth Management with Urban Growth Boundaries Tehran’s Greenbelt Experience

Increasing world population, especially in developing countries has had many serious problems. The rapid growth of urbanization and expanding urban boundaries is much faster than its population growth and infrastructure facilities development ratio. In Tehran, the capital of Iran, excessive physical growth got to be a complicated issue. Spatial chaos, lack of urban utilities, air pollution, traffic congestion, seizing agricultural land,marginalization, informal settlements, insecurity and social segregation, etc. have emerged as outcomes. Thisuncontrolled scattered horizontal urban growth is known as urban sprawl. However, there are dissimilaritiesbetween general view of this phenomenon in western and Iranian societies. Management and control theurban boundaries are inevitable. In order to control this growth, different policies in different countries suggested which the most important of them is the Urban Containment Policies (UCP). Greenbelt as an urban containment policy can protect the open spaces around the city from urban construction. But, due to some sort of circumstances this policy was not successful in Tehran. This paper tries to represent different kinds of urban containment policies and also introduce the experience of applying greenbelt policy in Tehran metropolitan area.

Keywords:

Urban containment policy , greenbelt , urban sprawl , Tehran urban development