classifying and evaluating the regional development of golestan province, using topsis model

regarding the necessity of regional integrated development, analyzing the dependency of human habitats in region-level, is the main duty in every planning. therefore, deprivation and inequality reduction is an important matter, due to its economic and social consequences and needs proper attention. in fact, to achieve comprehensive development and progress in the future; requires the recognition of different areas and regions. using quantitative methods and criteria in order to classify the habitats in spatial system of regions, in one hand leads to identifying the inequality level of habitat points, and on the other hand is a criterion to try for reducing and eliminating the inequality between them. the purpose of this paper is to identify the development level in the cities of golestan province. by investigating and analyzing the quantitative criteria in three economic, social and services categories; which are extracted from the up to date statistics of statistical almanacs and by making use of topsis model which is considered to be one of the multi-criteria methods of evaluation, it was concluded that due to the used criteria, there’s a large gap between the cities of golestan province and an unequal development between them; the western cities, located between the capital city and mazandaran province, are relatively better developed. therefore, the cities of gorgan, gonbad kavoos and maraveh tappeh have the first three ranks, respectively and two cities of maraveh tappeh and ghalish are among the most deprived cities and are placed in the bottom of the ranking.