Examining the Requirements of the Right to the City in the Policy-Making Process and Development Planning of the Cities: A Case Study of Tehran Transportation Development

Urban transport policy-making and planning is of great importance in determining the forms of the development of a city. Not only the future of the urban life but also the city dwellers’ daily lives depend on how the cities make transportation decisions. Considering the position of transportation policy in the citizens’ lives, this study aims at exploring and examining the requirements of the right to the city in the process of transport policy in Tehran. The study data were qualitative integrated and were collected through semi-structured interviews, higher-order documents, and libraries and were analyzed through grounded theory method. Then, through theoretical and purposeful sampling, 20 experts including some managers of different urban managerial systems and some citizens were interviewed until the data saturation. Later on, the collected data were coded and analyzed in the form of 9 axial categories and one core category. Findings indicate that the legal capacity for participation, institutional capacity, and transparency and oversight mechanisms are among the causal conditions of the requirements of the right to the city in Tehran's transportation policy. The macrostructure of Tehran’s urban planning, the underlying conditions, and the macro-decision-making system of the intervening conditions were identified. Reconstructing the requirements of the right to the city in the process of policy-making and planning for the development of Tehran's transportation system indicates that a comprehensive network of transparency and oversight, along with participatory planning, are the strategies that can be employed. According to the findings of this study, the requirements of the right to the city in the transport policy process can lead to good urban governance in this area as well as at the general level of urban management.