evaluation of urban land use change in urban instable development (case study: maragheh during 2001 – 2011)

land use planning, refers to how to use, distribute and protect the land. this type of planning can be considered from different perspectives, such as sustainable development perspective view is one of important land use views. in this paper we have tried to study and evaluate the land use change of maragheh city from sustainable development perspective, and study the harmony or disharmony with this type of development in the past ten years (2001 - 2011). in this paper, to achieve this goal descriptive and analytical method and documentary studies were used. all data in this study are documentary and include land use changing approvals by the commission 5 article in east azarbaijan province for the city of maragheh, during the study period.the result of this study indicates some inconsistency in some of the criteria for sustainable development and shows non-sustainable movement in order to destruction of green spaces, during the legislations related to changing land use. also the results of this research show that the cases that were referred to article 5 commission are quite remarkable. and in most cases in order to the interest of the applicants and the municipality have been approved and ignoring the urban sustainability and its physical and biological problems cause some problems. such as the largest number of investigated cases were for changing gardens and urban green spaces, without considering comprehensive and systematic view in whole city and with no attention to social and cultural issues in city. this factor also causes an imbalance in the system of urban land use and devastating effects in urban and regional planning will create. according to research in the past ten years (2001 - 2011), 45.29 percent of total land use change has been from gardens land use to residential land use. also the studies are indicated the fact that, for all changes that have been take place during the study period, changing gardens land use to other land uses with 49.86 percent was the maximum land use change. this amount of gardens and urban green spaces land use changing indicate for unstable movement in order to maragheh development.