International Journal of

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  The study seeks to address the importance of urban stream ecosystems from the perspective of urban ecology, human health and social well-being in the context of urban planning. The case study area is Paveh stream in the City of Paveh. The data from the case study area were gathered from questionnaire, existing scientific and library studies and by conducting interviews with residents and authorities. Once the importance of the biodiversity of the stream had been studied based on the existing ecological data, the social importance of the stream and the linkages between human health, social well-being and the biodiversity of the stream ecosystem were addressed.

  Based on the results of the survey and other sources of information, it was discussed that urban stream ecosystems can be rich in biodiversity and function as ecological movement corridors for species .Urban stream corridors can thus be an important part of the urban green infrastructure .Also we can make the weather fine, extend green space, prepare peaceful environment for residents and bring the countryside effects of nature into cities through improvement of stream landscape.

Finally, regarding the finding of this study some suggestions and implications are mentioned to improve the quality of the stream.

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Abstract Environmental Justice (EJ) concept consists of multifaceted movements, community struggles, and discourses in contemporary societies that seek to reduce environmental risks, increase environmental protections, and generally reduce environmental inequalities suffered by minority and poor communities a term that incorporates ‘environmental racism’ and ‘environmental classism,’ captures the idea that different racial and socioeconomic groups experience differential access to environmental quality. This article explores environmental justice as an urban phenomenon in urban planning and applies it in peri-urban environment of a metropolis. Tehran peri-urban environments which are the result of meeting the city- village- nature systems or "city-village junction" have gradually faced effects such as accelerated environmental decline, changes without land-use plan, and severe service deficiencies. These problems are instances of environmental injustice which make the planners to adjust the problems and use and apply the appropriate strategies and policies by looking for solutions and resorting to theories, techniques and methods related to environmental justice. In order to access to this goal, try to define environmental justice through justice and determining environmental justice indices to analysis environmental injustice in case study. Then, make an effort to introduce some criteria to select case study in two micro and micro levels. Qiyamdasht town as the peri-urban environment of Tehran metropolis is chosen and examined to show the existence of environmental injustice by questionnaire analysis and SPSS software. Finally, use AIDA technique to design a strategic plan and reduce environmental injustice in case study by introducing the better scenario to be used in policy- and decision-making areas.

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The aim of evaluating and studying the creative city indicators of the city of Qazvin is to determine the creativity trend of this city during the past years and to recognize the dominant field of creativity for this city. Therefore, this study has tried to analyze the creative city indicators about the city of Qazvin by using “descriptive-analysis” method as well as applying secondary data, TOPSIS model, AHP model and SPSS software. First, 13 indicators have been collected to determine the creativity trend from2009 to 2015, then the current trend of creativity in recent years has been obtained using quantitative models. Regardless of the year 2009 and the years before that, the best rank belongs to 2013 with 0.3228 scores. Generally, the creativity trend has decreased with a gentle slope in recent years. In the following sections, within introducing the dominant field of creativity among the five investigated fields, this conclusion has been made that the city of Qazvin has potentials to move toward a creative city.

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“The urban researches in Iran aren't applicable to the real challenges of Iran’s cities”. In order to examine the mentioned hypothesis, “existing problems of Iran’s cities” and “Iran’s urban researches” are compared by means of the urban news and research journals. The framework analyze method [a kind of qualitative research method] has been used to analyze the data in the form of axial-thematic codes. The findings showed researches conform to problems approximately 78 percent in themes but the importance and preference of both themes and axial codes in researches differ from existing problems, which indicates some researches don't concern problems.

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Nowadays, “Smart City” is a very growing and promoting concept. Unlike other concepts related to cities, like digital or green city, it encompasses all technological, human and institutional factors. However, there are too many different viewpoints and definitions of this concept in the literature. The problem statement of this research is that despite the existence of many points of view and definitions for the “smart city” concept, the management part of a particular city needs to formulate a special definition of “smartness” based on the specific characteristics, goals, priorities, policies, and constraints of that city. This paper provides urban planners and managers with an approach that helps them to determine a set of validated, customized and prioritized characteristics for the target city. These characteristics can be used to formulate a desired definition for the city, as an input for strategic planning of a smart city, a guide for aligning the main goals of a city, and a criterion for prioritizing the urban projects for a particular city. Our proposed approach consists of two phases. The first phase is based on a thorough content analysis on the significant body of the literature in order to take a valid and acceptable range of different viewpoints and characteristics of the smart city notion. The second phase relies on the characteristics resulted in the first phase and involves a specific form of validation, customization and prioritization steps for a particular city so as to determine a set of unique characteristics based on the upstream documents and stakeholders’ opinions. In order to show the applicability of the proposed approach, we present the results of applying this approach for the city of Tehran, the capital of Iran.

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In spite of the extensive body of research focusing on the concept of "public interest" within the realm of urban planning, there exists a notable dearth in the discourse surrounding the challenges and impediments encountered in actualizing public interest within the context of urban planning and management. The primary objective of this paper is to systematically identify and elucidate the obstacles impeding the realization of public interest within the urban development plans of Iran, offering a theoretical framework to explicate the interrelations among these hindrances. To achieve this goal, an investigation and analysis are conducted on three megamalls situated in Tehran City, serving as representative cases. The principal method employed for data collection is a semi-structured interview, with subsequent analysis carried out through the utilization of Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT). The outcomes of this inquiry reveal a categorization of barriers into five overarching domains: deficiencies within the urban planning system, conflicts of interest, the legalization of transgressions, a passive civil society, and challenges pertaining to public interest. Each of these categories is expounded upon comprehensively, delving into the nuances of their respective implications. Furthermore, a comparative discussion is presented, drawing parallels between our identified categories and analogous research findings on public interest conducted in various other countries.