Manifestation of practical judgements in tidal behaviors of Tehran metropolitan’s Urban Planners

This paper aims to understand and explain the practical judgements of planners in the urban planning environment of Tehran metropolis. The planning judgements and decisions have constructed in interplay of individual and collective frames of planners in a culturised context of planning. Planners make different judgements in their daily planning process – they define the planning problem, they formulate goals and objectives and implement certain instruments to develop, good or desirable places, neighbourhoods, cities or regions. They always perceive the world through a ‘cultural lens’ which consists of both individual planners’ and commonly shared accumulated attitudes, values, rules, standards and beliefs of planning institutions.By considering the objective of this study which is to develop a middle-range and substantive theory that leads to achieving a better understanding of the institutional behavior of planners in their lived experiences, the constructivist grounded theory has been chosen for this research. In this research, the focus of constructivist grounded theory is on the actions, interactions and social processes of planners. In constructivist grounded theory, my approach is based on the assumption that any theoretical interpretation is an interpretive image of the universe studied, and in this study suggests the institutional behavior of planners rather than a detailed image of it. The constructivist grounded theory practice in this research has been followed in accordance with the proposed Charmaz process.