Functional Evaluation of Mazandaran Province Cities Using Factor Analysis, Numerical Taxonomy and Cluster Analysis

Abstract: one priority of planning at the regional level is to recognize the system of residenceand particularly its urban system. one of the features of urban system in each area or country is theway of population distribution between the cities of these areas which is called city distribution size.in functional analysis of mazandaran province 41 development indexes of educational, cultural, social,demographic, economic, health and agricultural fields were selected, then by using factor analysis throughspss software, these factors were decreased into 6 main indexes and finally consolidated indexes wereextracted. then, these six factors were used as the inputs of taxonomy analysis in excel, and the scores ofcities which were valued between 0 -1 were obtained. finally, in order to classify mazandaran provincecities by using cluster analyses, spss and taxonomy scores, all of the cities were classified into 6 levels.to present the results graphically, gis software was used to present a map entitled “map of mazandaranprovince cities classification”. results indicate that sari as the center of mazandaran has located in level 1and amol, babol and qaemshahr as three most populous areas have also located in level 2. at the end ofthe article according to the physical plan of northern coastal region, related suggestions on setting optimaland well-balanced urban system have been proposed.