A Study on the Status of ‘Urban Design’ In Iran’s Urban Rules (A Content Analysis of the Decisions of Iran’ Supreme Council for Urbanism and Architecture from 1964 to 2016)

Over the past few decades, numerous articles and scientific books have been published on the theoretical foundations of urban design. However, in reality, ‘the quality of urban spaces’ as the most important concern of this field and profession has not yet been put into practice in many cities and especially in our country. Operationalization of urban design knowledge is feasible through the formulation and preparation of frameworks, requirements, and indicators in the legal texts of the country as upstream documents and development guidance programs. In order to investigate the status of ‘urban design’ in Iran's urban planning laws, this paper analyzes the content of the decisions made by the Supreme Council of Urbanism and Architecture of Iran from 1964 to 2016. To this aim, the most important ‘themes’ and ‘positions’ of urban design that were mentioned or emphasized in the council's resolutions were considered. For this purpose, the text of the decisions made during the mentioned period was first carefully read. Using an interpretive-analytical approach and the qualitative content analysis method, the decisions that were somewhat related to urban design issues were extracted and then the content related to urban design was examined in these 87 drafts. Analysis of the data indicates that while the smallest attention was paid to urban design in the decisions of the council (less than 5%), the highest degree of emphasis was on ‘designing zones and axes for the development of tourism’ and ‘attention to the textures and monuments’ with 7.48% and ‘urban landscape design’ with 6.95%, respectively. Among the positions, the surrounding areas of ‘monuments and memorials’ with 19.81% and ‘historical textures’ with 16.03% have received further attention compared to other urban positions in the council's resolutions. In sum, this study is indicative of a small share of attention paid to ‘urban design’ and ‘relevant documents’ in the decisions made by the Iran’s Supreme Council for Urbanism and Architecture.