Journal of Spatial Analysis

Vulnerability to natural hazards is one of the most important issues of villages in Iran. Iran is listed in the first ten accident-prone countries in the world. It annually imposes many damages on villages through natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, etc. To tackle the problem, an important attempt was applied during the recent decades is the policy of resettlement. The mentioned policy has been followed in forms of movement, integration and aggregation of villages. As spatial foundation and location of settlements are mostly based on natural environmental factors, then before any attempt, or before any dislocation of the villages, ecological potential of the new place needs to be evaluated. However, as dislocations resulted from unpredicted events such as flood are associated with emergency conditions and would be done very quickly; there is not enough time for evaluation before the action. In result, conducting such plans, unlike their positive impacts on service-delivery, cannot be quite welcomed due to ignoring the ecological and environmental factors which need to be considered before any actions. Therefore, such plans can create some negative consequences and be considered as non-successful plans.

       One of the projects that have been implemented in connection with this issue in Golestan province is dislocating and integrating flooded villages on Kalaleh County during 2001 to 2006. Based on the mentioned plan, twelve villages which were located at higher section of Gorgan Roud and were aggregated and located at a new site named “PishKamar”. These villages were flood-damaged. Such a site was urgently constructed based on a top-down approach, urban-based patterns and without considering the needs and ideas of stakeholders. So, such a plan needs to be evaluated and assessed against some normal and standard criteria. As such mistakes can be repeated elsewhere, recognizing the pros and cons of such plans would be a good guide and experience for the next projects. The present paper aims to evaluate the ecological potential, physical design of the site as well as measuring the levels of PishKamar site resident’s satisfaction.

      This study is a kind of the ex-post facto evaluation and its methodology is descriptive – analytical. To do that, we have considered a four-steps ecological potential of the site using Makhdom’s model. We also have used the 1:50000 topography maps, 1:250000 geological maps, 1:100000 land-use maps and 1:100000 soil fertility and capacity. All layers were transferred into ArcGIS environment, for more analysis. Data collection was based on surveying, interview and questionnaire. The statistical sample include 1350 households heads resided at the studied site, of them 200 persons were randomly selected for data collection purposes(According to Cochran   in the formula, standard deviation was 36%, test statistical was 1.96 and α was equal to 0.05). The results of the first stage of our study indicated that based on 330 primary integrated cells and overlaying the maps, there would exist 13 homogenous ecological units. In addition, a significant proportion of the Makhdom indicators used to assess indices was confirmed by chi-square test. Accordingly, 67% of cells in class I with good ecological potential and 8/28% of the cells in the appropriate ecological class II and only 2.4 percent were in class 3 to be inappropriate ecologically. Thus, of total 13 units, 11 units with an area equivalent to 127 hectares were classified as class I and II, and environmental units with an area of three hectares in third class were inappropriate. Therefore, the studied site was evaluated as a good site in terms of ecological conditions.

     In addition, evaluation of residents' satisfaction mapping site in terms of compliance with the ecological conditions and the physical texture design which was based on systemic approach of sustainable development indicators was revealed that the maximum satisfaction of residents was related to house orientation and strength of buildings, road network design and architecture patterns.But the dimensions of environmental issues including soil resistance as a result of landslides, climate harmony with the architecture and the wind direction has not completely been considered. Totally, of 11 evaluated criteria, people were satisfied with 6 of them and disappointed with another 5 criteria. It was confirmed by T-test.