New Town of Pardis and its Role in Decentralization of Tehran Metropolis

A new city is a city which is designed and constructed as a strategy for urban development in order to attract overflow population of metropolitan cities. Tehran، as the largest and most populated city in Iran، is the focus of population attraction. Regarding the facts that it has restricted on facilities and urban development and does not have the capability of attracting more population، new cities were created around it، such as Pardis. New city of Pardis was prearranged to be located 35 km northeast of Tehran with about 2600 hectares area in an unfruitful land in which urban life and dwelling dates back to less than 8 years ago. The Studies on finding the appropriate location for this city started in 1986. The prospect of this new city was predicted for 200،000 people but now (2006) only 52،000 people are living there. In this research، the function of new city of Pardis to attract some population of Tehran has been analyzed. The following hypotheses have been tested in order to see the aims of research: 1- It seems that management has been influenced on achieving the aims of Pardis (attracting some part of Tehran’ population and deconcentration). 2- It appears that attraction of Tehran’s population to the other new cities has been a factor to do not achieving the aims. 3-Lack of urban structures and employment in this city has played some role not to attract enough population. Finally it is concluded that new city of Pardis has not been successful in performing the role it was planned to (deconcentration), furthermore it has added to the problems of Tehran metropolis. Some suggestions have been offered to help reach the first aims deconcentration of Tehran metropolis designing new city of Pardis.