Population Growth and the Interaction of Urban Environmental Challenges, Case Study: Zahedan

During the recent decades, urban management in Iran has increasingly confronted numerous challenges due to different kinds of social, cultural, political, executive, financial, and legal factors. The present study is going to specify and analyze the aforementioned challenges in the domain of the urban environment in order to determine how far they have been effective, how they have been prioritized, and what strategies or solutions are needed to meet or reduce them. Zahedan is among those cities of Iran that due to its uncontrolled growth in terms of its framework and population, has exposed urban management to many challenges during the last two or three decades, specially, in the domain of the environment. The present study aims to investigate and analyze the effects of challenges, resulted from population growth, on the environment of Zahedan. This research’s method is descriptive-analytical and the gathered data and information have been statistically processed and analyzed using SPSS software. The results indicate that the greatest challenge in the domain of the environment is related to «water resources». Considering the population growth, human, soil, and air resources are respectively other problems which can lead to further significant problems in urban management system.