New Approach of Increasing Safety in Tehran by the Means of Passive Defense

Today it has been proven that it is almost impossible to take any action in complicated urban system without utilizing its internal capacities. The authors’ experiences show that improvement of safety level is not an exception. And concentrated top-down plans which aim to improve safety are not very successful in practice. Because if the citizens do not conform to these approaches and involve themselves in their enforcement, their implementation will cost highly and on the other hand will need permanent monitoring with the aim of preventing any contravention. Hence seeking for new approaches is essential. The authors’ experiences and new theories declare that the only pioneer approach is dividing the city to small local units and creating incentive and common goal which is improvement of neighborhood inhabitants’ safety as their common interest and more, improving the level of safety in these units by residents participation and at the end improving city safety through providing high level of safety in its small units. The items which are related to physical factors are the most important items of improving the safety level. In fact a context with minimum vulnerability toward disasters and planning for minimizing military attacks can have a considerable impact on residents’ safety. Appropriate locating of significant infrastructures and strategic facilities, which have critical role in city vulnerability and could be very effective in managing disasters after they have occurred plays an important role in improving safety level. It is indeed necessary to introduce an optimum pattern for locating these land uses with the participation of inhabitants. A pattern that due to neighborhood inhabitants’ involvement has the least implementation obstacles. Accordingly, in this research, after presenting the principles of participation, neighborhood orientation and scrutinizing of these land uses, all the significant land uses will be located in a neighborhood as an example. The selected neighborhood for this research is Bagh Melli neighborhood, in district 12 of Tehran. And eventually it would be possible with the participation of inhabitants.