Applying advocacy planning approach in urban plans of Iran - Case study: Urban land use adaptation plans

The formation of approaches with the attitude of advocacy planning can be related to the existence and continuity of spatial and socioeconomic inequality and the conventional failures of planning. In Iran, planners who work as urban planning engineers in most of the consulting engineer’s companies, or in person, can use their expertise to encourage citizens to follow their legal rights and to increase their social participation. Examples can be found in plans that are intended to change the land use through the Organization of the Engineering System to eligible city planners. The purpose of the present study is to review the literature of advocacy planning and its application to urban land use adaptation plans. It also tries to show the relations between land use adaptation plans and advocacy planning theory in terms of topics, methods, and goals (the relation between theory and practice). The methodology of the present research is qualitative and data were collected through deep interviewing techniques and nonreactive measures (archival records). The field theory approach has been adopted to analyze the information and to present the final theory. Based on the qualitative sampling method of the typical case study and the theoretical saturation criterion, the views of thirty-five experts in the field of urbanization have been used in this study and their perception of the research questions have been analyzed. Using the "grounded theory" method and data coding, nine core categories were extracted from the initial findings. The result of the present study, with regard to the final core category, indicates that “urban adaptation schemes cover many aspects of advocacy theory in urban planning, and can be considered as a practical dimension in many aspects of Advocacy Planning Theory”. The findings reveal the deep relationship between the theory of planning advocacy and urban land use adaptation plans.