Problem Finding Framework in New Towns: Problem-Orientated Planning in Hashtgerd New Town

The intensification of urban problems along with their increasing complexities and uncertainties leads to the need for a planning system to focus on finding the right problems, analyzing and solving the problems. New towns, as a response to the problems of large cities and metropolitan areas, are planned to be balanced and self-contained without duplicating the problems of existing communities. It means that their agenda and development goal was always to create problem-free communities. Besides the successes in development process of new towns, they have also encountered varying problems. Such problems are considered complicated problems, as they are multi-dimensional. That is why they require multi-dimensional solutions, while planning approaches were based upon traditional approaches mainly concentrating on the physical aspects of planning with no consideration to the nature of problems. This is a problem-orientated approach, and deals with both problem-finding and problem-solving processes by applying a suitable spatial approach based on strategic thinking headed for developing innovative and multi-dimensional solutions to cope with such problems. In new towns development experiences worldwide, two categories of problems are identified. First, problems caused due to the initial planning processes in terms of selecting the location and size of the new towns. Second, problems faced by residents in the course of the development of each new town. In this paper, a problem finding-problem solving framework’ or paradigm, is devised to be applied in new towns and specially Hashtegerd New Town (as a case study for the underlying research of this paper) that is situated to the west of Tehran the capital of Iran. This framework is based on creative and rational processes of problem-solving, and uses features and techniques of both, according to the nature of identified urban problems. New towns of our country were planned and accordingly developed on the basis of worldwide experiences of new towns’ development. Applying the proposed framework, the problems of Hashtgerd New Town, using content analysis and in-depth interview methods, are identified in this paper to be in three categories. First, the procedural and substantive problems related to the content of new-town development plan that is a result of benchmark errors from global experiences. Second, the problems that the residents experienced during all stages of the development of new town. Third, the problems related to the deviation of the implementation of the plan. Based on these three routes, problem statement of Hashtgerd new town is formulated, then in the analysis stage of the paper, creative problem-solving methods, i.e., “six word question” and “fishbone analysis”, are applied to detect the causes of problems and to classify problems in two categories with the use of “laddering the problem” method. This paper found that the first class of problems are procedural problems that solving them is the pre-condition of a planning activity based on strategic thinking. The second group are substantive aspects of planning and includes such aspects as population balance, which requires applying problem-orientated and goal-oriented processes of planning. The third class of problems are related to the decision-making structure of the new towns.