Introduction

Human activities unfold within geographical space, an organized set of natural and human elements whose identity and dynamics are expressed through spatial organization. In peri-urban areas, where urban and rural forces act simultaneously on settlement structures, this organization becomes particularly complex. Two complementary strands of research have addressed this complexity: network-analytic studies that describe the existing hierarchy and flows among settlements, and multi-criteria decision-making studies — most notably the Analytic Network Process (ANP) — that identify and prioritize the factors driving structural change. Few studies, particularly within the Iranian context, have combined these two strands within a single research design. The Hanza settlement system, located in Rabor County, Kerman Province, offers a representative case of a peri-urban system in transition: although the town of Hanza was designated the administrative center of the newly independent Hanza district in 2009, field evidence suggests it has not fully assumed the functional role of a service center for its surrounding rural hinterland, owing largely to its location outside the system's geographic center of gravity and to its selection on political rather than functional grounds.

The central aim of this study is to identify and explain the spatial structure of the Hanza settlement system and to prioritize the factors influencing its structural-functional transformations, in order to provide a framework for balanced planning interventions and the reduction of spatial inequality in the region. The research addresses two questions: (1) What is the hierarchical, network, and institutional structure of the Hanza system? (2) What is the relative priority of the criteria affecting the system's structural-functional transformations, and how do the explanatory findings converge with the descriptive findings?



Method

The study follows a two-phase mixed-methods design. The first, descriptive-analytical phase combines documentary sources (1996–2016 population and housing censuses, topographic and administrative maps) with field data collected through a household questionnaire (352 households, determined via Cochran's formula from a population of 2,268 households, distributed by proportionate stratified sampling), interviews with local elites and officials, direct observation, and focus-group sessions. Social Network Analysis (SNA), grounded in graph theory, was used to examine four types of inter-settlement flows (people, goods and services, agricultural products, and capital) at both intra-system and extra-system scales, with settlements treated as nodes and flows as edges. Network density and vertex-degree indices were computed in Gephi. Zipf's rank-size rule was applied to the household counts of the system's 81 settlements to compute the primacy index, and a Composite Priority Index (CPI) — an unweighted average of three normalized indicators (mean intensity, maximum intensity, and the share of critical sub-criteria) — was used to rank the five key dimensions of local problems. In the second phase, a panel of 15 experts in regional and rural planning, selected purposively, evaluated 25 sub-criteria across five main criteria (environmental-ecological, physical, social, economic, and political-administrative) through Delphi review followed by pairwise comparisons within an Analytic Network Process (ANP) model, processed in Super Decision 3.2.0; questionnaire reliability was confirmed via Cronbach's alpha (0.90), and the consistency ratio of the pairwise-comparison matrices ranged between 0.04 and 0.07.

Findings

The Hanza system's population (9,442 in 2016) is overwhelmingly rural (84.6 percent), with the town of Hanza itself accounting for only 460 households, compared with 269 in the second-largest settlement (Jowaran/Marjan) — a primacy index of only 1.71, well below the conventional threshold of strong primacy (>2), and a four-city index of 0.90. Network-density indices for all eight flow graphs remained below 0.11, confirming a hub-and-spoke structure dominated by a small number of settlements (Hanza, Seyed-Morteza, Qanat-e Malek, and Kahnuj) at the intra-system scale, while the town of Raber emerged as the principal external attractor at the extra-system scale. The Composite Priority Index ranked the physical (infrastructural) dimension first (0.921) and the political-administrative dimension second (0.592) among residents' perceived priorities. At the explanatory level, the ANP model identified the environmental-ecological criterion as the most influential (cumulative weight 0.307), followed by the political-administrative (0.248) and economic (0.227) criteria; at the sub-criterion level, formal local-management institutions (0.186) emerged as the single most influential factor among all 25 sub-criteria — a weight concentrated almost entirely within one criterion, in contrast to the environmental-ecological weight, which is dispersed across six sub-criteria. This concentration underscores the strategic leverage of institutional intervention. The convergence of the political-administrative dimension's second-place ranking across both the resident-perception (CPI) and expert-judgment (ANP) approaches — despite their entirely different data-collection methods — together with the structural network evidence of Hanza's weak centrality, provides three independent lines of evidence pointing to the same conclusion: the weakness of local management institutions is not a peripheral finding but the central explanatory axis of the system's structural-functional condition.

Conclusion

The Hanza settlement system, despite considerable natural, economic, and social potential — most notably a high level of generalized trust and social participation — suffers from a structural weakness at the level of its intra-system service center, low network density of inter-settlement flows, and partial dependence on centers outside the system. The study's principal contribution lies in demonstrating the convergence of descriptive (SNA, CPI) and explanatory (ANP) findings around the central role of local-management institutions, offering planners an empirically grounded basis for prioritizing interventions: immediate institutional capacity-building, followed by medium-term investment in connective infrastructure, and longer-term, multi-sectoral management of the system's environmental-economic resource base.