Urban Non-Governmental Companies: A Solution for Citizen's Participation in Urban Management

Heterogeneity between urban structure and the requirements of the population has given way to cultural and social problems which are sometimes insurmountable in a way that the range of social, economic, and cultural changes has extended to political domains. The absence of a management and planning system and of a democratic supervision, in a centralized one-way approach, affects planning and surveillance system and gets the urban management into trouble. Therefore, implementing a unified local, regional, and cooperative management would be rendered impractical and the plans for democratic and identified urban development would lose practicality and legitimacy. In other words, the structure of city management is in line with the structure of country management and there should be correspondence between the two structures. A city, as a part of national sovereignty, has a general nature which has various components. Due to such properties, the city requires macro-management at local and national levels so that the balance of city development and its correspondence with the whole structure of the country could be maintained. Therefore, the government, via rules and regulations, takes the role of a leader of macro-policies and the municipality is responsible for multilateral planning for the whole system of the city and is the supervisor for implementing the plans for neighborhoods and regions which help keeping to the structure and regulations of the city. The current managerial structure of the cities in Iran does not correspond the participation of people in managing cities. The purpose of this article is offering proper methods of increasing citizens’ participation in the structure of urban management. To this end, utilizing comparative-descriptive research method has been suggested to help actualizing public participation while observing the features of Iranian culture and following the successful structure of neighborhoods and cities, hence, to create the basis for utilizing the benefits of such participation, non-governmental companies have been introduced. Naturally, the new structure will face legal obstacles, technical regulations and standards, planning and management methods, current organizations of municipalities and some state institutions, and the absence of job-description models. With reforming current municipal regulations and structures in favor of the new structure, it is expected that the new structure, in the framework of city-, neighborhood-, expertise-, and processed-based strategies, recreate the structure of the cities in form of identified neighborhoods and regions and make them a better residential place for today’s citizens.