Democratic approaches in urban planning and the emergence of agnostic theory

Over the past few decades, democratic procedures have been raised as main core of most urban planning methods. In this regard, the present research adopts Descriptive-Evaluation methods and uses meta-analysis method so as to review the democratic procedures at the heart of planning theories and democracy and to explore their paradigmatic interaction. The main challenge is the emergence of planning Practices based on public interest and in alignment with democratic nature of it, so the results of present research suggest that transition to post-modern era of planning perspective is accompanied by association between democratic procedures and certain subjects such as public interest, consensus, pluralism, uncertainty and agonistic arenas. In this regard, the theory of planning has experienced a paradigmatic shift towards agonistic planning which is a democratic accountability mechanism premised on intellectual support of agonistic democracy. So this article tries to recognize and set up a platform for emergence of new democratic theories, especially appearance the agonistic planning theory in Iran, and consequently the formation of social discourse due to turning hostility into agnostic and replacing enmity by disagreement or aggression by competition.