The Importace of Rethinking in Urban planning Methods and Urban Policy, Case Study: Harandi Neighbourhood

In recent decades, through global transformations, the quality of urban issues in Tehran has undergone fundamental changes. Nowadays we are confronting entirely new issues in cities. In this confrontation, urban planning has serious deficiencies. Instead of applying a radical view, it is emphasizing on immediate measurements and in this way, theorizing is being meaningless. Such a trend is very dangerous because renders urban planning and policy irrelevant. The main problem is lied in the methodology of the dominant approaches in planning. This approaches, use old and new concepts and theories without any critical consideration. While we are essentially facing a new emergent phenomenon: urbanization and production of space on a planetary scale. This new phenomenon is unprecedented. Therefore, the new issues derived from the new phenomenon are unique. Consequently, we need new methods and approaches to understand the new issues. Any analyses of urban question in Iran must be considered in connection with this larger context. Spatial inequality must be conceptualized on the extended framework. Thus, we should focus on this emergent form – the process of urbanization and production of space – and its internal reproduction mechanism. We should introduce relations and forces into analysis which are operating on various levels, and place cases like Harandi Neighborhood in this extended picture. Otherwise, the analysis is merely restricted to the appearances and we cannot understand more fundamental processes and structures which create these appearances. In this paper, by focusing on Harandi neighborhood, it is demonstrated that the most important barrier exists before resolving urban issues, is the dominant approaches of urban planning system. The most important defect of the dominant approaches is lack of holistic view and thus their fragmentary dealing with the problem. It is argued that issues such as Harandi neighborhood, come from interconnection and interaction of forces and logics existing on various global, national and local scales which are simultaneously economic, political, conceptual and physical. To confront urban issues, it is needed to employ integrated, holistic and complicated approach which is devoid of current reductionisms. Such an alternative approach can be reconstructed on the basis of the political economy of space, and particularly on the Lefebvre's theory of the production of space.