Analysis of Disputes among Stakeholders in Urban Space for Feasibility of MediationCase Study: 17-Shahrivar Pedestrian Way in Tehran

Urban plans, especially in the central and old textures of cities, have a considerable complexity and expansive scope of interests of groups and stakeholders. For this reason, there is a need for a balance between sometimes conflicting objectives and interests of stakeholders in urban projects. In the event of disagreement, mediation between the beneficiary groups can, in turn, alter the attitudes of the parties to the disputed issues that have arisen, and so they will be able to find common ground and solutions. One of the important urban projects which has been performed in Tehran in the recent decade is turning the 17-Shahrivar Street into a pedestrian way. This street is one of the central axes of Tehran, which has relatively important traffic and functional role. Execution of this project led to lots of debates among pros and cons; particularly, there were three major groups involved with this project: urban managers who want to make a cultural axis to hold religious ceremonies in especial days per year, shop owners around the street (mainly car exhibitions) and households (residents). These three groups had different concerns and interests. The conflict in the project began from the beginning of the project in 2012, when the residents believed that the project was poorly informed, they were not consulted or received a proposal. On the other hand, at the managerial level, some officials of urban organizations and members of the city council disagreed with the project, because of the weakness of the previous studies, lack of coordination, lack of transparency and disapproval by the city council. City council members, with information about the area, took a decision to provide the municipality with a two-month period in March 2015 to provide the solution, which did not lead to a conclusion. Until the end of the year, the City Council, reopened a major part of the route, but even yet, there are still cases of dissatisfaction among the beneficiaries. The current research, which forms part of the pre-mediation stage, uses a descriptive-analytical method based on the content-based analysis and database theory approach. In this paper, after identifying the disputes and the main beneficiary groups of the 17-Shahrivar Street of Tehran, forty-five interviews were carried out, and information was encoded based on the content analysis method. The findings of the research show that there are more challenges and barriers to the existing facilities for resolving the disputes in the 17-Shahrivar route. Although the parties agree on issues of prioritization and ambition for the mediation process. However, there are challenges such as lack of proper relationships and trust among the parties to the dispute, the severity of high dissatisfaction especially by the business community and the problems of the Tehran city administration system, such as lack of proper accountability, lack of coordinated management, top to bottom command-line management, and insufficient funding has made the process difficult to resolve.