Analyzing the Obstacles to the Realization of Citizens' Participation in the Context of City Council Elections Law (Case Study: Tehran City Council)

The necessity of citizen’s participation in the process of cities’ spatial development is obvious. Having the necessary infrastructure to achieve this goal is one of the important challenges for policymakers in urban communities.  Requirements for the rights of citizens and residents in the process of city development have been predicted in Iran’s city council election laws which go back to about 100 years ago, at the time of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran. In the current century, the election law of the city councils and villages has undergone some changes and has developed over time. With all these developments and reforms in the city councils’ law, there is still a large gap between the voters (citizens) and the candidates (city council members). The main objective of this research is to analyze the barriers to realization of citizens’ participation in the context of city council election law in the city of Tehran and to propose a solution to eliminate these obstacles and realizing the participation of citizens in the true sense. In this research and in order to achieve the specified objective in the case study of Tehran, descriptive- analytical methodology using logical reasoning techniques were used to analyze the organization, duties and selection of Islamic councils’ law. The results of the analysis of the laws and the study of resources show that the gap between citizens and the urban management (municipal administration) is the absence of citizens' constitutional demands realization mechanism and lack of city council and municipality performance evaluation process by citizens in different districts of Tehran.