Abstract

One of the most important manifestations of sustainable development in any country is the extent to which that country has stable income sources. In fact, sustainable income is the basis of sustainable urban development. Nowadays, in many cities of the country, providing financial resources by municipalities has become an important issue in urban management. Municipalities' access to favorable and stable sources of income makes the municipality play a more active role in the urban environment and respond appropriately to the needs of citizens. In any country, municipalities or general governments are considered as one of the most important public institutions that are responsible for providing services to city dwellers with the aim of providing the basic needs of life and as a result reaching a developed city. For this purpose, municipalities should have resources and incomes because today, in addition to insufficient income sources, there is a more serious problem called income instability facing municipalities. In developing countries, including Iran, which consist of an inefficient economic system, weak tax systems, and lack of citizen participation mechanisms in providing city expenses, the revenue provision system of municipalities is mainly directed towards unstable and unhealthy sources of income. In Iran, this issue became more apparent after the implementation of the self-sufficiency policy of municipalities in the 60s. Therefore, the municipalities of the country should look for solutions in order to achieve stable incomes so that they can reliably start their services, tasks and projects at the right time and finally achieve results. This research investigated the revenues of Zanjan municipality and analyzed it in terms of sustainability criteria. Therefore, the main research question is, what are the most stable sources of income in Zanjan city? The study philosophy is an interpretative type with a qualitative approach. The strategy of the research is descriptive and it has explained the main problem of the research with the technique of content analysis and the analysis system based on the analysis in soft operations (Dimetal and interpretative structure). The statistical population of the research includes all urban planning experts in the field of urban management (municipal employees and university professors), so 12 people have been selected as a sample of the statistical population.

The results show that the most important revenue sources of the municipality from the point of view of urban planning experts of Zanjan city include public transportation revenue, design of cultural space and exhibitions and booth rental, subsidies and gifts, residential and land sector services, insurance fees, citizens' self-help. On the other hand, income sources such as density sales, building permits, Article 100 commission crimes, municipal borrowing from government cartels, commercial stabilization are among the most unstable and least important sources of municipal income. In this way, it should be acknowledged that Zanjan city municipality needs more maneuvering on the first group's income sources in order to provide its income sources for the city administration. Therefore, looking at these sources of income, two points are important: the municipality should earn the most of its income from the place of providing its services and receiving its fees, as well as the city tax that citizens pay for these services. Such a process leads to more involvement of people in the process of running city affairs. A look at the process of planning and urban management in Iran has shown that there is no correlation between these sources of income and the performance of municipalities. In general, due to the importance of social dimensions in Iran, the municipality cannot fully provide the real price of its services from among its citizens. Therefore, it is selling urban land and density. In the study of Haji Lo and his colleagues in 2016, it is stated that the majority of municipal revenue sources are unstable and only less than half of these sources move towards sustainability and usefulness. Considering the concept of continuity of incomes, it is feared that there is no possibility of continuation of these incomes in the municipality. In the end, it can be said that the results of the present research can be presented and generalized to most municipalities and urban management system in Iran.