Neighborhood-Oriented Approach and Security

Modern cities abound with insecurity and social damages. Provision of security in a city which has developed and extended formlessly and inordinately on the scale of thousands of kilometers seems very difficult, if not impossible. For this reason, large cities which have now gone beyond human aspects and suffer from every kind of conflicts and irregularities have led to appearance of all-out damages, so that they seem unable to supervise and control irregular behaviors and make human environments safe for different social groups in any of social, cultural and economic aspects. This is why they are basically considered unsafe environments In this regard, urban security is one of the important scientific, technical, practical and official matters that is now examined as an interdisciplinary and comprehensive field in terms of urban sociology, laws, geography and police-security sciences, and deals with the destiny of the body of citizens, the totality of social and economic system of the country and the city, and specially the large-scale security issues. Tehran, the two-hundred-year-old capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has assumed a multi-lateral character in political, cultural and economic terms through various historical stages. This has led to heavy concentration of population and economic and cultural activities, as well as vast physical development. This situation has caused lack of coordination among activities, population, space, infrastructures and security equipment, so that Tehran has become the hotpot of urban crimes and insecurity among all the cities of Iran. The increasing growth and vertical and horizontal extension of Tehran, especially after the Revolution, as well as initial migrations after Iran-Iraq war, caused to the emergence of social, economic and housing issues that led to a major gap between the police’s limited potentials and the increase and breadth of crimes and new criminal equipment. Concentration of crimes is not the same at all twenty two districts of Tehran. In this paper, the city of Tehran and the security issues concerning the daily-increasing physical and demographic development of this city have been studied, and the Ozgol 164 police station and its area of activity, which includes districts 4, 5, 6, and 10, have been investigated as a case study.