Urban Fringe; Protection or Development (Investigation and Analysis of Five Decades of Planning For Urban Fringe)

The issue of management and planning for urban fringe in different countries always experience different approaches, attitudes that are generally in the form of protection or development of urban fringe and surroundings areas, because it depends on political, economic and institutional developments over time. For this reason, there is no uniform and formal definition of urban fringe among different countries. Over the past five decades, city of Tehran has adopted different policies in the plans and provided projects which were different in the preparation and implementation. In the present study, five decades of planning for the Urban Fringe of Tehran are investigated and analyzed, and these programs have been studied and analyzed from two dimensions of policy and quality. The paper is applied and is based on a non-intrusive interpretive approach. The information gathering tools are library studies and use of various sources and texts. The study's findings for policy analysis identified five categories (management, planning, organization, conservation, development) and for analyzing the quality of the seven categories (program presentation, effect of reality, popular participation, infrastructure capacity, land status, implementation and adaptability). The results of the analysis of the programs show that in the developed programs the main approach and policy is based on the protection of Urban Fringe, which in order to achieve it should improve the integrity (due to the way of implementation) and legitimacy (due to lack of public participation) of the programs.