Analyzing Associations between the Price of Urban Properties and Population Size with City Development Index in a Selected Cities of Iran (Esfahan, Tabriz, Qazvin, Zanjan and Ilam)

Urban development is defined as the process of quality of life improvement of all the citizens. To reach to this aim, it is required to consider and respect some pertinent principals, rules and norms. In order to begin planning for urban development process, the first step is to evaluate the status of the cities and their development level. Hence, the need for evaluating the development level of cities led to propose an indicator named City Development Index (CDI) by the second UN-HABITAT conference held in Istanbul in 1996. In this study, to determine the effective factors on CDI, we examined associations between the price of urban properties and population size with the CDI. Descriptive and analytical methods are used to analyze the data. Pierson Correlation Coefficient and Regression analysis in SPSS software were used to examine the associations between the study variables. A review study of the available data in internet and libraries were used as the study data. The results for the selected cities in our study show that there was no significant relationship exists between the price of urban properties neither with the CDI nor with the population size. However, a significant association was found between the population size and the CDI (p<0.01). Therefore, considering conditions of the selected cities in Iran, it can conclude that the CDI increased along with increasing the size of population.