Evaluation and comparison of procedural and substantive indexes for sustainable development in Districts 7 and 22 of Tehran

Abstract Population increases day to day and causes some difficulties which are more noticeable, especially in urban areas such as Tehran as one of the most populated cities in the world. Nowadays, these difficulties highlights the role of sustainable development. Needless to say, inequality in urban life is sign of failure in fulfilling of sustainability development. Based on multidimensional features of sustainable development paradigms and existence of different attitudes, it is difficult to have a perfect and multidimensional consensus in this field. Different attitudes and evaluation of sustainability methods signify the substantive dimensional issues such as environmental, social and economic features. In many societies, despite the resources, high-quality environment and high rate of social and economic features, failure in reaching sustainable development goals can be observed. Thus, it seems that investigation of of dimensions and indexes of sustainability and holistic attitude in this field can provide a new attitude towards societies. Attaining sustainability in this field needs a holistic cognition of the existing condition of the society for planning and giving strategies to reach advance rate of sustainable development in society. The aim of this study is to investigate the sustainability of urban life in Districts 7 and 22 of Tehran municipality with different attitudes by considering dimensions of sustainability in terms of substantive and procedural criteria. Substantive criterion includes environmental, social and economic indexes and these features not only exist in deep layers of society but also can change according to other conditions and are affected by sustainable development policy. Another criterion which is normally ignored in the evaluation of sustainable development, is procedural index which is formed by the indexes acting independently as a political process in society. In this regard, library and ocumentary studies, field observation, questionnaire and interviews were employed. The collected were analyzed by SPSS software and statistical method. The results show that District 22 is better in terms of both procedural and substantive indexes compared to District 7. Analyses show that District 22 not only receive high amount of investment in sustainable development by the local government (district municipality) but also supports some capacities which exist in the region. In addition to heightening the quality of management and local government, this district creates new capacities and helps in increasing the level of society.