Application of Urban Acupuncture Approach in Prioritizing the Deteriorated and Historical SitesCase Study: Pamanar Neighborhood in Tehran

Today, cities are faced with a multitude of issues that caused them to have injured appearances. Efforts to cure these injuries are similar to surgeries on an anesthetized city which not only has disrupted life in the city, but has also caused irreparable damage. Existing research shows that in Iran, especially in Tehran, most of the intervention strategies in deteriorated urban sites have not achieved the desired goals; goals including reducing urban poverty and social vulnerability, increasing resilience to disasters, upgrading local identity, increasing the efficiency of the transportation system, reducing environmental problems, and  achieving social justice. Considering the urban characteristics and urban planning crises in Iran, it seems that in order to achieve the goals and efficient regeneration of deteriorated urban sites, it is necessary to change the basic approach in parallel with social, economic and political changes. Therefore, it seems necessary to use a new intervention model. The aim of this study is to propose a method for prioritizing intervention sites in deteriorated urban neighborhoods through participatory processes as well as the reduction of costs, shortening the implementation time of projects, and increasing their efficiency through an urban acupuncture approach. The aim of prioritizing neighborhood sites is to achieve sites with the least problems and the most development instruments. Because of the small scale of interventions in the urban acupuncture approach, the maximum number of problems should be eliminated by using powerful development instruments. To apply this method, Pamanar neighborhood in Tehran was selected as the case study. This neighborhood is located within the Oodlajan neighborhood in Zone 2 of District 12 of Tehran’s municipality. With an area of 150 hectares and a population of 16943. It is one of the five historical neighborhoods of Tehran and many of its buildings are of great historical significance. The edges of the neighborhood are mostly surrounded by commercial uses beyond urban districts. Due to the intrusion of commercial storage uses into the neighborhood and migration of its residents, Pamanar faces serious problems such as severe depopulation, deterioration of fabrics and buildings, diminishing cachet of activities, shortage of urban services, declining environmental sanitation, stagnation in the real estate market, and increase in crime rates. The data collection and analysis methods of this study include semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, examination of the development documents of the neighborhood, analysis of space syntax in Depth Map software package, prioritization of the indicators using the AHP questionnaire and analyzing them in Expert Choice software, and analysis and overlap of the data using ArcGIS. The findings suggest that in all phases of the study, prioritization of intervention sites is possible through analyzing motion flows and designing and implementing participatory processes in the framework of urban acupuncture. As a result, the priority of the intervention is first in the internal fabrics, second in the sites around Pamanar street, third in the sites around Mostafa Khomeini street and finally in the sites around 15 Khordad, Naser Khosrow and Amirkabir streets.