A Thematic Comparison of Urban Designers’ Knowledge about Tehran’s Urban Problems

Following the significant growth of urban designers’ research during the last 30 years in Iran and the growth of the range of issues in Iranian cities, the question is to what extent have urban designers addressed the issues of Iranian cities in their articles, dissertations, books, meetings, and conferences? By doing so, the future direction of research can be mapped to solve the problems of Iranian cities. For this purpose, the study identified Tehran's urban problems based on grounded theory and in-depth interviews with three groups of experts from urban management organizations, consulting firms, and universities. The result could be categorized in cultural, social, and environmental qualities as the substantial dimension of urban design and urban design education, and documents, laws, plans, and projects as dimensions of urban design procedures, and urban management and urban economics as interfering factors. After identifying the main categories of Tehran's urban issues and calculating the frequency of concepts in each of them by the participants, it was identified that about 22% of the frequency of Tehran's urban issues is in the field of urban management. Also, urban design education, urban system, urban documents, and laws have the largest share of Tehran’s urban problems, respectively. Among the issues related to the quality of the city, social quality and environment have been the most important, and cultural quality has been the least important. In addition, by examining the subcategories, it can be seen that the most highlighted issues by the interviewees are related to organizational structure of urban management, financial resources in urban economics, curriculum and stakeholder communication in urban design education, issues of urban projects in the category of documents, laws, plans, and projects, challenges of mobility and access in the urban system, environmental cleanliness in environmental qualities, urban justice in social qualities, and urban identity as one of the cultural qualities in Tehran. Then, by comparing them with the thematic frequency of articles, dissertations, and books published by urban designers, it was found that among the qualitative dimensions of the city, while most of the issues are related to the quality of the environment, it has a very insignificant place in the volume of urban designers’ research. Social qualities such as urban justice, social capital, and public law have been considered in the studies of urban designers. Although mobility, access, and traffic are the main issues of urban systems in Tehran, less attention is paid to them in research compared to other urban systems. The importance of other urban systems, especially the form of the city, has a significant place in the studies. Generally, it can be stated that the number of research by urban designers in the dimension of urban design procedures is very small. In terms of the substantial dimension, while the studies related to the urban system are justifiable, the qualities of the city, especially the quality of the environment, should be given more attention in the research.