Mosque - Based Sustainable Cultural Community Development;Case Study ofSamen Al-AemehMosque in Tehran

In recent decades, the approach to the planning of sustainable community development has had a huge importance in the field of urban planning and management.The participation of people is one of the main factors of this approach and it tries to include them in different stages of decision making, execution and evaluation and tries to benefit from their capacity and potentials. This has been the center of attention in Iran in recent years and many books have been published about it. In order to implement such an approach in every city, we need to consider their specifications and provide a local pattern for them. One of the main elements of Islamic cities and communities is mosque which hasusually beengiven a central role in them and has assumed different functions in history and contemporary time, and because of that,it can be used as an effective example of cultural-social development at local level. In this research a local type of cultural-social development based on mosque has been presented. To do this, we have connected many studies done on community development, cultural-social development and mosques and we have introduced 9main components as the main factors of sustainable cultural-social community development based on mosques. Then by using qualitative method and interviews and participatory observation, we selected Samen-al-Aemeh Mosque in Shahrak-e-Gharb district, and while adjusting those components with it, we assessed the scope of the feasibility of this development together with the existing obstacles.The conclusion is that despite its not achieving an ideal efficiency in all socio- cultural domains, the mosque has succeeded in promoting cooperation and people’s participation in their local issues and developing their community sense.