Analysis of Socio-Economic Effects of Metropolises on Suburban Villages from the Perspective of Local Communities (Case study: Mehrabad village - Damavand city)

Cities and villages are the main centers of human societies. They shape the geographical foundations of an area that have special relationships with each other based on socio-economic and spatial characteristics. The rapid spread of technology in recent decades has transformed the way of living and working in cities and villages. On the one hand, this expansion has caused anti-urbanism and on the other hand, it has increased the desire for second homes and rest in places far from cities. This is especially the case for neighboring villages in metropolitan areas, especially Tehran and other large cities. Therefore, every rural settlement located on the outskirts and around these urban centers has been exposed to attention and impact, which affected the villages in different ways. The question is that how villagers see these developments and how they feel the impacts of such changes. The purpose of this article is to study the social and economic effects of the expansion and growth of the metropolis of Tehran in the village of Mehrabad from the perspective of the residents themselves. The research method is based on documentary and field studies and quantitative and qualitative methods. The statistical population of this research is the householders of Mehrabad village (612 households), form which, due to financial and time constraints, the researcher selected 230 householders using the Cochran formula. The next step was to randomly distribute a questionnaire among the householders and to analyze the answers using SPSS software. The results showed that, in the social aspect, the most important effect of metropolitan growth and urbanization in Mehrabad village was the change of the attitude of villagers towards rural life and economic activity, and in the economic aspect, it was the imbalance in employment and the decrease in income and savings of the villagers, which has occurred as a result of neglecting agriculture and animal husbandry.