Settlement relations in the city and region of Kashan, Iran

Abstract

Kashan is one of a number of ancient city regions on the margins of Iran’s arid central plateau. The region has a well-defined territorial socio-economic pattern in which an urban upper class has in the past maintained its control over the illiterate mass of the people in the city and its satellite villages through the ownership of land and water rights, carpet-weaving contracts and credit. In recent years, however, Land Reform and the co-operative movement have altered the economic and political balance between town and country, while the growth of a modern textile industry has radically altered urban industrial structure. Rural response to change, through migration or agricultural development, has been governed by an inheritance of land and potential water resources which varies much between upland and lowland. A multivariate analysis of one hundred Iranian cities is described: the occupational, housing and demographic structures of the cities are shown to be related to their location and to their relations, through migration, with their hinterlands. The need for study of cities with under one hundred thousand population is stressed since size directly affects urban growth. In the present case, though commerce and industry in Kashan City are growing rapidly the pace of regional urbanization has been relatively slow. Within Kashan City the grafting of new suburbs onto the old pre-industrial quarters is the latest manifestation of an already established social order, but a detailed areal study reveals that the statistical dividing line in population and housing between the suburbs and the old town, and between urban and rural areas is hard to distinguish. The operation of central-place principles in the provision of goods and services in the region and in the land use and land value surfaces of the city is described.