Effective agents in Implementation Quality of Urban DesignThe Case of Shohada Square, Mashhad, Iran

The quality of the implementation of urban design in developing countries usually faces financial, technical, political, and cultural challenges. Despite the important role of urban design discipline and its documents in the realization of the quality Urban Development for decision-makers in Iran, implementation of urban design projects is usually evaluated by Quantitative methods. The appropriate process of reaching the product‏, context, goals, and issues for realizing an appropriate urban design project is neglected. As urban design projects in Iran share a common identifying of the methodology, this study analyzes Shohada Square project in Mashhad (the second largest Iranian city) as the case study since it is one of the most important urban design plans in the last decade.To investigate challenges pertaining to implementation of this project and proposing a model, after reviewing the literature, by applying directed content analysis, the theoretical components of implementation in urban design are extracted and assessed in case study through observation, methodical interview, and document content analysis.This study with the emphasis on the need to replace qualitative-normative criteria with the quantitative‏- physical ones, suggests a primary model for correcting the neglected areas to improve the quality of the implementation of urban design plans. Therefore, concepts associated with the quality of the implementation of urban design projects can be modeled in terms of the hierarchical dimensions of the background and context, the actors, and the design approach. Taking the quality of economic and financial mechanisms into account, political-legal contextual quality , the motivations of developers, eliminating conflicts by guiding the decision-making environment , using the process approach and the hierarchy continuum of design documents can be effective agents in improving this quality.