Objectives: Fars province includes 24 townships and urban districts that are highly different in terms of ecological condition, area and population congestion. For example, Shiraz urban district has a high population of 1.3 million while in other urban areas such as Bavanat, Pasargad, Farashband and Arsanjan less than 20 thousand people live. There are considerable differences among the Fars urban areas in other aspects and especially in economical fields. Great differences among the Fars urban areas assert the necessity for more consideration to the less developed urban areas in provincial programming. Such a programming and aiming at the especial areas needs to rank the different areas priority. This study aims at ranking the Fars province urban areas based on a composite development criterion.

  Methods: In order to rank the urban areas, fuzzy and numerical taxonomy

  approaches were used. Regarding the complexity of selecting the appropriate indices indicating the development level we focused on the indices that are more cited in development economics. These indices, as aggregate groups, are demographic, sanitation and health, communication and newspapers, education, public and recreational facilities, cultural, and economical and welfare indices. Each of the groups contains detailed indices, amounting to 29 indices totally. The dataset comes from Fars province 2006 census and annually expenditure survey of 2006. Our sample also contains the urban areas of Fars province.

  Findings: The findings showed a slight difference among Fars urban areas in terms of demographic, sanitation and health and education indices, accounting only for 23 percent of combined development index. The individual weight of the above indices is also 6, 10.38 and 5.89 percent, respectively. While more than 77 percent of differences were generated from other indices. Based on the fuzzy approach the higher is the weight of a special index, there will be more difference among the areas in terms of that index. Based on the fuzzy approach urban areas of Shiraz, Bavanat, Arsanjan and Farashband were found with the highest rank in terms of the development level. While Ghir and Karzin, Zarrindasht, Pasargad and Mamasani were recognized as the regions with lowest development ranking.

  Results: The findings of the study showed that there are low differences among the Fars province urban areas in the case of demographic, sanitation and health and education fields and most of the differences in urban areas resulted from public and recreational facilities, cultural, and economical and welfare indices. It was also found that the fuzzy approach is more powerful in ranking as compared to numerical taxonomy.