One priority of planning at the regional level is to recognize the system of residence
and particularly its urban system. One of the features of urban system in each area or country is the
way of population distribution between the cities of these areas which is called city distribution size.
In functional analysis of Mazandaran province 41 development indexes of educational, cultural, social,
demographic, economic, health and agricultural fields were selected, then by using factor analysis through
SPSS Software, these factors were decreased into 6 main indexes and finally consolidated indexes were
extracted. Then, these six factors were used as the inputs of taxonomy analysis in Excel, and the scores of
cities which were valued between 0 -1 were obtained. Finally, in order to classify Mazandaran province
cities by using cluster analyses, SPSS and Taxonomy scores, all of the cities were classified into 6 levels.
To present the results graphically, GIS software was used to present a map entitled “Map of Mazandaran
province cities classification”. Results indicate that Sari as the center of Mazandaran has located in level 1
and Amol, Babol and Qaemshahr as three most populous areas have also located in level 2. At the end of
the article according to the physical plan of northern coastal region, related suggestions on setting optimal
and well-balanced urban system have been proposed.