Today, the expansion of urbanism has led to many problems for various countries in the world, especially developing countries. Iran is one of the developing countries that in recent years has faced numerous damages due to population increase, especially in urban areas. In recent years, countries in the world have tried to overcome the problems deriving from unsustainable urbanism via using sustainable urban development. Accordingly, the authors carried out this study to determine the similarities and differences among sustainability evaluation systems existing in developing and developed counties and explain the needs of developing countries, like Iran, to improve management of urban areas. Therefore, in the study at hand, the global urban sustainability indicators such as BREEAM Community، CASBEE-UD، GBI Township، LEED-ND، IGBC Green Townships، GRIHA-LD، Green Star, and IUSAF were examined and were compared with the intended system in Iran (IUSI). In this process, the similarities and differences of selected evaluation systems were compared with each other in terms of type and importance level of indicators. The obtained result showed that the urbanism challenges in various countries in the world are different based on the development level and environmental, social, economic, and geopolitical conditions. In addition, the most important indicators of urban development measurement in developed countries were identified as energy, resources and social welfare, smartening, and environment, while the prioritized indicators in the developing countries were determined to be planning and developing the society, managing infrastructure resources, transportation, local security and economy, employment, and – mostly importantly – access to healthy water. Moreover, the findings of this study indicate that via localization of the systems and indicators related to sustainability evaluation for every country, region, or province, a more precise evaluation can be attained. This can offer great assistance to future planning to advance the sustainable development goals.

Strategic spatial planning is presented as an approach to deal with the chronic challenges facing the sustainable use of space, i.e. the physical-spatial division and the policy-planning division. However, there are major barriers to realizing this approach in Iran, which are affected by its governance and planning system approaches. In this regard, the current research has attempted to identify and explain the major barriers to the realization of strategic spatial planning in Iran with an exploratory approach and a combined interview and targeted Delphi method. The data was collected through a semi-structured interview in the form of a targeted Delphi method in two rounds of 25 experts, and the barriers and related concepts were confirmed, extracted and described using MAXQDA software and Kendall's coefficient of agreement. The results of 405 extracted codes indicated that there are 4 major barriers to the realization of strategic spatial planning in Iran, which are: geographical-spatial barrier (6 explanatory concepts and 26% of the extracted codes), rentier political economy barrier (7 explanatory concepts and 34% of extracted codes), institutional division barrier (7 explanatory concepts and 23% of extracted codes) and structural-spatial division barrier (7 explanatory concepts and 17% of extracted codes). The present study highlights the importance of recognizing and correctly confronting and taking constructive measures against the four mentioned barriers, which are the main sources of physical-spatial and political-planning divisions in the way of realizing strategic spatial planning in Iran.