The Study of People's Participation Obstacles in Tehran's Urban Management: A Qualitative ContentAnalysis*

Participating in city management, increases citizens perception on affairs about their issues and themselves and helps to create a better society and development . But the participation of real people ( citizens ) and legal people (crafts, guilds, humanism organizations and … ) face a lot of official, historical , social and cultural obstacles in city management . Therefore, this study has been done with the goal to identify obstacles in Tehran’s citizens participation . After a review on sources and developing a conceptual frame about participation in city management, semi-structured interview ( deep ) technic have been used for collecting data and interviewees have been located in 4 groups : former and present members of Islamic City Council if Tehran , Senior managers of Tehran Municipality , members of science committee in public universities and city councils experts . In choosing former and present members of City Council of Tehran , Rey , and Tajrish it has been tried to have equal members of two of the major political orientation: Reformist party and Principlist party . In the choosing of the second group ( former and present Senior managers of Tehran Municipality ) top managers (former mayors, former and present deputies of municipality ) have been interviewed and because they had experience in interacting with Islamic City Council and governmental and public institutions And the third group are people who are members of science committee of city management related fields and have had experience in researches and some had executive experiences and at the end city councils expert that have had the experience to attend committees and council commissions have answered the questions of this study . For choosing the samples, targeted and theoretical sampling technic with the most diversity has been used. Data have been analyzed and coded with qualitative content technique and Maxqda-12 applications. The result of analyzing the qualitative data showed 3 main categories and 7 sub-category as obstacles in participating in city management including the city texture ( urban structure, neighborhood-base weakness ), macro city management challenges ( inefficient management, conflict of interest) , legal-political obstacles ( negative approach to participation, apolitisme, weakness of the law ). Then the result of the study got adapted to the studies similar to this one and they had many similarities. Overall, if conditions for participating are provided, we could see strong presence of urban inhabitants in city management.