A Futures Studies Analysis of Creative City Policymaking: A Study on Tehran City

In urban sociology, one of the recent responses to “the quality of future cities” is the idea of“creative cities”. The concept of the creative city has generally been used as a form of strategic planning. This idea, as stated in Landry and Florida’s views, is inevitably tied to widespread changes in the economic and social order. The “Creative City” is one of the theoretical efforts that describe and recommend the future of the world’s metropolises with an emphasis on creative class and creative economy. In this study, using the scenario planning based on critical uncertainties, we tested the question of what the future scenarios of Tehran are for creative development. In response, the two key uncertainties extracted, using the two-step Delphi Method, are “increase or decrease in the importance of citizen participation, social and cultural capital”, and “the development of new businesses or the existing industries”. The scenarios resulting from the intersection of these two uncertainties are “creative Tehran”, “industrial Tehran”, “unstable creativity”, and “turbulent Tehran”. To shape a creative city, the best scenario is the first one, “creative Tehran”, and the worst scenario is the last one, “turbulent Tehran”. In the latter scenario, the importance of citizens’ participation and the social and cultural capital not only is lost, but the environmental pollution and the social damage in Tehran will also be worsened by the development of existing industries.