Analyzing the Role and Potential Responsibilities of Iranian Urban Designers in Their Profession

Despite the passage of about fifty years since the establishment of the urban design course at the University of Tehran and after that teaching at other universities in Iran, it still seems that the potential capacities of this course and graduates have not been used well in the profession. The purpose of this research is to identify and explain the duties, roles and potential capacities of Iranian urban designers in their profession and seeks to answer the question of what their potential duties are in their profession.

The current research was formed with a qualitative approach and in order to answer the above question, it used the methods of content analysis as well as qualitative survey. The techniques used in data collection include reviewing library documents and related articles, open interviews with professors, experts and experienced professionals, as well as a structured online questionnaire, and in line with the analysis The Interpretive analysis technique was used for the data.            

The achievement of this research is to introduce and evaluate the importance of 8 activity capacities of Iranian urban designers in their profession, which are respectively: urban management, consulting engineer's offices, NGO, education, interdisciplinary activities, supervisor (supervision of design and implementation), contractor and research. According to the findings of the research, among these eight capacities in the field of urban management, offices of consulting engineers, non-governmental organizations, and education are respectively more important from the point of view of urban design experts.