Investigating the Indices of Social Capital and its Relationship with Sustainable Urban Development

Social capital as one of the prerequisites for urban development has elements such as social trust, social participation, social cohesion, social awareness, and degree of religiosity, each of which has different components in different societies. And the development of sustainable urban development depends on providing relative prosperity, citizen participation and increasing social awareness for all members of society. The purpose of this paper is to measure social capital indices and its relationship with sustainable urban development in urban areas of Ahwaz. The present study is a descriptive-correlational one from a methodological point of view. From a single point of view, it is based on structural equations which has been done in Ahwaz in 2018. In this regard, library studies have been used to explain the literature and theoretical foundations and field method has been used to study the case study. Data collection tool is a researcher-made questionnaire. Structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis were used to analyze the descriptive-inferential statistics data and SPSS and Amos software were used. The statistical population of the study was 384 citizens of Ahwaz city and the sampling method was random. The results of this paper showed that social capital and Sustainable Urban Development status are different between Ahwaz city areas. In other words, high social capital among the citizens of Ahwaz is a means of enhancing the sustainable urban development and structural dimensions of the city including economy, community, institutions, space and environment. The implications of this research for the strong link between social capital and sustainable urban development, the need to pay attention to the components of social capital and to adopt policies to maintain, enhance and enhance social capital to ensure sustainable urban development in the geographical area of ​​Ahvaz. It looks great.