The Role of Nature as the Infrastructure of Public landscapes on Sustainable Development of Kerman City

Sustainable development is one of the main challenges of human being in recent years. Sustainability science has been introduced as an approach to modify the interactive relationship between man and nature. This approach has provided three components for sustainability of cities: society, the environment and the economy. In one of the latest presented models, the environment has been considered as an infrastructure for two other factors. It seems to be possible to retrieve this pattern in cities that have been able to stay sustainable over the years. The city of Kerman is a good example of the sustainability pattern in which the city (community and economy factor) is based on the nature infrastructures (environment). The main natural infrastructures of Kerman city can be described as desert, water and mountain. Kerman’s public landscape, which are the products of people’s beliefs and the interactions between the society and the environment, are influenced by these three natural elements of Kerman, so that at least one of these three is influential on the so-called landscapes. The aim of this paper is to recognize the natural infrastructures of the Kerman city, and to answer the question “how it is related to the urban perspective?” Afterward, the given content has been discussed through analyzing the qualitative data of the case study, Kerman city, and concluding from it. This paper first introduces the patterns of sustainable development and natural infrastructures. Afterward, the natural landscape and public landscape was defined in order to study the role of the natural landscape infrastructures on the public landscape of the city. At the end, a classification of natural infrastructures was defined in order to classify the public landscape in Kerman based on their relationship with the natural infrastructures.