Cities play a vital role in local development providing a high education level, specialized jobs and advanced services. When assessing living conditions and wellbeing in cities, economic indicators alone are generally unable to evaluate the inherent complexity of the ‘quality of life’ issue in urban environments. With rapid urbanization, shortage of infrastructures and services emerged in metropolitan regions of developing countries, leading to disadvantaged settlements, urban poverty, lower citizens’ satisfaction, and an overall decline in life quality. Based on these premises, the present study illustrates a subjective investigation of life quality in an emerging economy such as Iran, focusing on Arak, the fourth largest industrial pole of the country. Based on a literature review on quality of life in industrial cities of emerging economies, subjective indicators of citizens’ satisfaction on living quality in Arak were identified and quantified using empirical results from a field survey. Results of our study show that the overall satisfaction for living quality in Arak is rather low, reaching the lowest rank in the issues of environmental sanitation and public transportation. Lack of investments in urban infrastructure justifies the low citizens’ perception of life quality in Arak city. The paper concludes outlining the urgent need of homogeneous and comparable macro- and micro-data on multiple aspects of quality of life at both city-level and metropolitan-level in emerging economies.

This research investigates the reasons of changing the agricultural land use to tourism in a developing country with different political, economic and social context (Iran). The method used in this research is qualitative, and unstructured interviews have been used to collect data. The target population of the research includes farmers who have sold their farmlands to investors in the tourism sector and experts from the agricultural department of the relevant county. The interviewees have been selected through using snowball method and after reaching theoretical saturation, the data collection process was stopped. The results showed that various macro and micro factors affected the process of changing the agricultural land uses to tourism, including the weakness of the agricultural sector in creating income and job opportunities compared to the tourism sector, the weakness of the land use laws and the lack of inter-organizational coordination in law enforcement, the weakness of the property registration system and the lack of a national cadaster, the lack of effective government support of the agricultural sector, the rapid rise in land prices and, ultimately, the change in the attitude of farmers both old and young once towards the agricultural activity and the level of welfare.

Purpose: This paper aims to identify and determine regional tourism axes in Hormozgan Province, Iran, as a region with significant potentialDesign/methodology/approach: The research method is quantitative and uses the fuzzy accreditation tool and TOPSIS model; the identification, determination and ranking of regional tourism axes have been performed by analyzing the spatial distribution of tourism attractions in the GIS environment.Findings: The results show that given the capacities of Hormozgan Province, at least 15 axes are recognizable. This paper highlights regional tourism planning as a tool for urban and rural socio-economic development in potential provinces such Hormozgan.Originality/value: This study provides a number of practical implications for regional tourism development as follows: it identifies some of the most important potential axes in Hormozgan Province, which can be considered as investment areas in the national and regional tourism development strategy. The spatial results of this study could be embedded in all urban and rural developmental plans in the province. Tourism investment should shift its spatial concentration from the spot approach, especially islands and cities, to the axis approach while equipping those axes as comprehensive spatial strategic regional tourism plans. Sectoral tourism in each sector including sports, economy and nature could be planned as if sectoral institutions and organizations are going to develop their own tourism goals.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of tourism on Land Surface Temperature (LST), an issue which has rarely been considered in the tourism development literature. In this research, remote sensing techniques have been used to analyze the changes in the LST and spectral indices including the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI) and Enhanced Built-Up and Bareness Index (EBBI). The data used were based on Landsat Collection 1 Surface Reflectance (SR) images taken in June and August. They were analyzed over 32 years in the years 1987, 1993, 1999, 2009, 2014 and 2019. The study area included the cities of Babolsar and Fereydonkenar and their suburbs in Mazandaran Province in the north of Iran and south of the Caspian Sea. First the tourism zones were separated from other land use zones and then the changes in land use and LST in each of the zones were studied for each year based on the trend of 32-year change. The results of Pearson correlation in the whole area for each main land use zone showed that there was a significant inverse relationship between the LST and the NDVI and MNDWI indices. This relationship was direct and significant for the EBBI index. Moreover, the results of one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey test showed that the LST changes in the tourism zones during the study period were significantly different from the other zones, so that the tourism zones always experienced lower LST. The findings also showed that, in the tourism zones, the values of the NDVI and MNDWI indices showed an increasing trend compared to the urban zone. Therefore, increasing the values of these indices due to the development of green space and its regular irrigation in tourism zones has led to a significant decrease in the LST. The applied results of this research in the urban planning and tourism literature indicate that any model of physical development such as urban development does not necessarily lead to an increase in the LST, and this is entirely dependent on the physical design strategies.

The present study attempted to examine the impact of inhabitants’ perceptions and local community participation on supporting sustainable tourism development. The goal of the current study was to determine how local community involvement and local views affected the development of a sustainable tourism industry. Inhabitants’ positive/negative perceptions and local community participation had direct but differential effects on supporting sustainable tourism development. Findings revealed that positive perceptions of residents affected their support for tourism development at twice the rate than their negative perceptions did, which indicated their higher readiness for participating in the tourism development process. Moreover, findings showed that using 16 latent variables to form a structural model and a path analysis method was good enough in terms of covering the research questions and analyzing the dataset.