The Department of Geography and Urban Planning

:Department history

Geography is the science of environmental planning and seeks to establish a balanced relationship between man and the environment where he lives. It seeks to explain processes and the forms resulting from these processes, and the spatial analysis of phenomena and structures in a spatial space. Although all countries strive for development today, geography prescribes sustainable development, a development that, in addition to providing the available resources to today's human, will also leave a legacy for future generations.

The history of teaching geography in Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz dates back to 1986, when thirty credits of a program of history teaching courses were allocated to teaching geography so that graduates of this program could teach social science courses in middle and high schools. The Department of Geography and Urban Planning was formed in 1994, and in February 1995, it accepted its first undergraduate students. Ten years later in 2005, the department admitted students for a master's program of Geography and Urban Planning, and in 2013 students for a master's program of Geography and Rural Planning were enrolled. Finally, in 2014, the first PhD program of Geography and Urban Planning was launched in this department. A large body of research including books, articles, and research projects has so far been conducted by professors and students of the Department of Geography and Urban Planning, as a step towards alleviating the problems and challenges of Khuzestan province and the country.

Programs offered by the department:

Geography and Urban Planning (Bachelor's level, Master's level, PhD) and Geography and Rural Planning (Master's level)

 

The programs, subdisciplines, and their establishment date

 

	Bachelor	Master		PhD
Subdiscipline	Geography (with a focus on urban planning)	Urban planning	Rural planning	Urban planning
Establishment Date	1995	2005	2013	2014

 

Statistics of students by program and subdisicpline:

 

 

	Bachelor	Master		PhD
Subdiscipline	Geography (with a focus on urban planning)	Urban planning	Rural planning	Urban planning
Number of students	124	32	28	18

 

Educational focus of the department:

The focus of the Department of Geography and Urban Planning is on urban planning studies (urban planning, tourism, urban management, suburbanization, urban decay, urban hazards, urban resilience, passive urban defense) and rural planning (rural management, rural socioeconomic issues, rural women, etc.) to meet the research needs of the metropolis of Ahvaz and rural areas of Khuzestan province. There are other fields of interest in the department including topics related to the field of meteorology (climate change, applied meteorology), geographical information system (geostatistics, spatial analysis, processing of satellite images and aerial photographs, etc.) and political geography (political relations, political structure, and political climate, etc.)

 

: Research focus of the department

 :Number of faculty members and their tendencies

 

The Department of Geography and Urban Planning has 12 faculty members, of whom seven are experts in geography and urban planning (Dr. Mohammad Ali Firoozi: Professor; Dr. Masoud Safaeipour: Professor; Dr. Nahid Sajjadian: Professor; Dr. Saeed Maleki: Professor; Dr. Saeed Amanpour: Associate Professor; Dr. Mostafa Mohammadi: Associate Professor; Dr. Majid Goodarzi: Assistant Professor) two in rural planning (Dr. Morteza Nemati: Assistant Professor; Dr. Zahra Soltani: Assistant Professor) one in climatology, (Dr. Sohrab Ghaedi: Assistant Professor), one in remote sensing and GIS (Ali Shojaeian: Instructor), and one in political geography (Dr. Afshin Karami: Assistant Professor).