Common People: "Internal Meta-Criterion" for Successful Plans (Review of Tehran's Urban Design Projects Implemented in Three and a Half Decades Since the 1980s)

Concepts such as goal, success, method, criterion, perspective, cultural context, scale, and plan type include the conditions that have made the quality assessment of urban projects so complicated. The present study aims to find the most important external or internal criteria for successful urban design projects implemented in Tehran for 35 years since the 1980s. Therefore, the Delphi method is used to achieve a consensus on the research topic among urban experts. To this end, forty experts in urban design, urban planning, urban management, architecture, and sociology fields are asked. With the consensus of experts and using the new criticism approach, derived from "Theory of Criticism", this article thus attempts to find the major criterion for the successful projects. Although a clear common ground on the failure of urban design projects might retrieve from extensive literature about Tehran's development plans during recent years, little research has been conducted on its successful implemented plans or their criteria. The awareness of such a plans, not only reports or increases the plans' motivations in recent decades but also may drive future decisions based on the criteria for successful plans. This can also result in the study of qualitative methods using for the evaluation of urban design projects. The research results show that assuming a fixed criterion for evaluating the effects of urban design projects is insufficient as assessment works more dynamically. Furthermore, the "process-oriented", "product-oriented", "external" and "internal" criteria are distinguished in this research and it is found that consideration of "public participation and people needs" in plans plays the most important role in the success of plans, followed by "organizational and technical aspects" and "quality of the design", respectively. The public participation criterion is also latent in other criteria, therefore, it is an internal meta-criterion for successful plans. However, in Tehran's urban design projects, it is left out of the design process.