Investigating the Evolution of Spatial Structure Patterns of Migration in West-Azerbaijan Province

Migration and quality of redistribution of population across country is one of the main factors that planners take into account to control population and guide its movements to economic poles. Scientific recognition of migration phenomenon is important for managing and policy making in the country. These movements change migration pattern, in a way that along with increase in population and the number of cities, urban-urban and rural-urban pattern of migration turned to be the dominant pattern of migration. This pattern was geographically influenced by regional differences and social and economic attractions of cities and villages. Unplanned movements of rural population may bring undesirable consequences to regions and improperly change the region’s morphology and spatial structure pattern of the entire region. The main purpose of this research is to investigate and understand the patterns of intra-provincial migrations during last decades and to analyze the underlying factors. The method adopted for this research is quantitative and the approach is descriptive-analytical. Research data includes intra-provincial migration data in scale of the province’s rural sub- districts (Dehestan) during 1996- 2011, which is obtained from the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI). To analyze migration data, the methods of calculating the intensity of crude migration and factor analysis were used; then, correlation of spatial structure of West-Azerbaijan province with the variables of density, distance, connection and intra-provincial migration rate was examined. The results show that spatial structure of West-Azerbaijan was unidirectional in 1996; but, the spatial distribution trend of migration during selected 15 years revealed a kind of decentralization and tended towards clustered spatial pattern. The pattern of spatial connection changed from duality model to continuity model.