An Investigation of the Dimensions and Factors of Legitimacy of an Urban Planning System (Based on Literature Review and Iranian Experts’ Opinion Polling)

The concept of legitimacy along with its close meanings and implications such as righteousness, justification, validity, etc. has always been one of the domains of interest in political structures and public and even private systems. However, despite the rhetorical use of this concept in the current discourses in the political arena, its implications in the specialized sub-systems of a government, including an urban planning and development system, are less discussed. In this study, an attempt was made to investigate the dimensions and factors of legitimacy of an urban planning and development system through reviewing scholarly literature, as well as interviews with 23 experts and elites in the field of urban planning in Iran. The results showed that there is no significant difference and epistemic gap between the content of the studies in global literature and the total perception of the domestic experts regarding the dimensions and factors of legitimacy of an urban planning system. In total, 17 factors of legitimacy in four dimensions, namely, political-social, legal, normative, and technical-functional were identified. Subsequently, through interviewing 16 out of 23 of the participating experts, the internal relationship and potential interactions among these factors were investigated by ‘fuzzy cognitive mapping’ method. Finally, based on the composite indicator resulting from the averaged normalized value of three indicators, namely, frequency, centrality, and total intensity of potential impact of each factor and dimension on other factors in the network, the factors and dimensions were sorted out based on their score. The results revealed that the legal dimension had the highest score overall and the political-social, technical-functional, and normative dimensions ranked next in order.