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Iran's rural settlements, in spite of their comprehensive and multi-faceted developments in the last decades, are still considered to be among the settlements faced with crucial challenges in the face of environmental hazards. As a result, prearrangement for upcoming events and disasters, as well as paying attention to the management of rural disaster in dealing with particularly natural events turn out to be necessary. The rural areas of Sarwabad, in Kurdistan, are also considered among the areas susceptible to natural disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, and landslides. The purpose of the research is the identification of settlements, and safe and hazardous landslide zones with particular focus on disaster management in Sarwabad. This research is methodologically analytical and essentially functional, and, by using geographical information system (GIS) and the analytical hierarchical process (AHP), the researchers analyzed the data and the layers and provided the ultimate version of combined hazard maps and also overlaying maps for the purpose of factorial assessment. The findings have been in the form of spatio-populatory analysis of the settlements, and resulted in identifying the safe and unsafe villages and zones. Moreover, it is found that nearly 46 percent of the rural population and 31 villages of the area are located in safe or low-hazard-level landslides, while the rest of the settlements and rural population are located in the mid and high-hazard-level zones and, as such, are need to be secured in these zones.

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Housing enjoys a multilateral functioning in the rural system. One of the aspects highlighted by planning system is the renewal and rehabilitation of housing. In our country, Iran, development of rural housing has experienced a growing trend, especially in the physical and structural aspects. However, a large part of the rural population in different areas of the country is living in non-resistant and less durable housing. This article attempts to analyze the spatial distribution and quality of rural housing in the country. In this article it is tried to address and analyze the spatial distribution of quality and construction of rural housing in various provinces in the country. The data was derived from document studies. The quality of rural housing in 9 indices has been measured for each province of the country. Data has been analyzed using VIKOR method for the multi-criteria decision analysis. Finally, the classification of provinces based on the construction and quality of rural housing was conducted using K cluster analysis in SPSS and output was drawn in GIS as a map. The results showed that there is a significant difference and distinction in the types of materials used in the rural settlements. Such that a significant percentage of the houses are made out of bricks, iron and stone that somehow confirms the durability and normal quality. In terms of spatial and local distribution it can also be said that the quality of rural housing in most of the provinces (i.e. 24 provinces) are in low-quality, medium and/or appropriate levels. Meanwhile, only three provinces of Mazandaran, Azerbaijan Sharghi and Kerman enjoy the excellent quality in rural housing construction.

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Return migration is a reaction to the attractiveness of rural areas. This type of migration can have many and varied effects on rural area reconstruction. The purpose of this study was to identify and analyze the effects of return migration on the reconstruction of rural settlements in Neyshabur. The research method is descriptive-analytic and a questionnaire based.  In this study, 37 villages in Neyshabur that had returning migrants were surveyed. And 55 effects of returning migrants on rural areas reconstruction were identified, that the Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.942 indicates the optimal reliability of the research instrument. The indices were evaluated under three social dimensions with 18 indices (α = 0.925), economic with 21 indices (α = 0.891) and physical-environmental with 16 indices (α = 0.852). Exploratory factor analysis was used because t-test showed that there isn't significant difference between the three dimensions except social dimension. The results showed that 55 effects identified return migration can be classified as 14 main effects with 78.79% variance.  Accordingly, 1- increasing cohesion and solidarity among residents with 25.21% of variance, 2- improving service and welfare infrastructure with10.52% of variance, 3- boosting rural economy with7% of variance, 4- activating of capacities with 5.4% of variance, 5- developing Non-farming activities with 5% variance are the most important effects of return migration on the reconstruction of rural settlements.