SLUM PHENOMENON AND MARGINALIZATION IN THE RAPIDLY URBANIZING DEVELOPING WORLD CASE STUDY OF IRAN (Karaj and Sistan-va-Balouchestan)

Informal settlement is a phenomenon verifies in the majority of developing and underdeveloped countries due to different reasons, such as deficient social and economic structures, rapid growth of the poor population and immigration from rural areas into urban regions [1]. Iran, as a developing country, has faced a rapid urbanization growth in the last 40 years. Urban populations grew from 31.4% in 1956 to 68.6% in 2006 [9]. Therefore, it can be concluded that from 70 million Iranian populations, more than 48 million persons live in urban areas. For instance, Tehran as capital of Iran faced uncontrolled growth because of the different illegal settlements in these years which were included through political forces. Although the rate of urbanization growth has changed considerably during these years, it has kept going. On the other hand, it is estimated that a quarter of the urban population will live in informal settlements in the next decade [2] which can named with the title of Slum areas and Marginal regions. Slum in developing countries is shaped by emigrants who choose big cities for different reasons though because of low technical proficiency level and lack of sufficient asset, they don’t have the ability to move to the text of the city so they inevitably accept to have a marginal life. They frequently select city’s marginal or raunchy lots and they choose them illegally. Slums have become ubiquitous in the developing world, where they commonly take the form of squatter settlements. The term slum is culturally defined and pejorative,with social as well as physical connotations. It is usually applied by outsiders, often inappropriately and to justify public intervention in neighborhood affairs, through programs such as slum clearance, and the term has often been resented and resisted by local residents. Plenty of various reasons were indicated for migration and formation of informal settlements around the outskirts of major cities in the world so far, but Iranian cities have experienced different conditions. Iran as a developing country with the rapid urbanization has met particular informal settlements among developing countries since 1960s. Meanwhile, one eighth of the urban population live in the Iranian informal settlements that more than 40% of such informal settlements population reside in the surrounding of Iranian major cities such as Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Tabriz, and Shiraz. Informal settlements and its social and physical consequences are considered as one of the main urban planning issues. The methodology that we interested to do this project is searching and gathering some information about slum and marginalization in two different cities with different characters but in the same country and at the end making a conclusion for the research. Therefore, the present study focuses on the informal settlement and focuses on slum zones around two major cities in Iran. The first is Karaj1 and the second is Zahedan2, a city near Tehran (capital of Iran) and a southeast border city of Iran respectively

Keywords:

Marginalization , Slum , Border cities , Informal settlement , Urbanization