The Review of Urban Development Plans from the Perspective of Democratic Theories

Nowadays, democracy as a paradigm that has universal appeal and legitimacy has become a responsive ideology on a global scale. We have recently seen significant improvements in the field of democracy paradigms. Accordingly, urban planning theories have also developed in line with theories of democracy in order to accommodate contextual and substantive legitimacy. However, theoretical levels of planning in Iran have not been able to match the appropriate intellectual and temporal alignment with the paradigm shifts in democracy. The present study has attempted to evaluate the degree of convergence of Iran's urban planning system with theories of democracy by using a descriptive-analytical method and a meta-analysis. In this regard, an attempt has been made to use the main features of democratic theories and especially the recent theory of deliberative democracy, to analyze the different layers of urban development plans in Iran and as a case study the development plan of Mahabad city. The statistical population of this study includes three target groups; first, 50 stakeholders and experts related to Mahabad city development plans have been selected to identify existing procedures and the interview and questioning process has been done. The second group, consisting of 25 city managers, and the third group, 140 citizens, were randomly selected and tested. Findings of research in three levels include; 1) Relationship between planning and democracy in Iran, 2) Comparison of theoretical attributes of urban development plans in accordance with democratic procedures, 3) Evaluation of the steps of preparing the document of urban development plans, shows not only there are no paradigm symmetry between theories of democracy and content and procedure’s Iran planning, but also It has not found at the three stages of the process, outputs and outcomes.