A meta-study of scientific research in the field of urban governance in Iran

Governance is an approach that has become the dominant analytical model in urban management in recent decades. In this approach, urban management is not only in the hands of the government and the government decision-making and implementation for the city in a collaborative process between governing institutions, the private sector, and institutions. It is done popularly. In other words, it can be said that urban governance is a process that respects the presence and promotion of the role of activists in the decision-making and administration of city affairs. On the other hand, the increasing number and variety of scientific research conducted in this field is one of the reliable signs of the importance of this issue among researchers, so by benefiting from previous studies, a native model for urban governance can be created. , proposed to fit social values and be compatible with cultural and historical conditions.  Based on this, the present research has reread the scientific studies of the field of urban governance by using the meta-study approach. In this research, in addition to combining the results of previous researches, it has been tried to reflect on their processes. Therefore, firstly, the general and structural features of the previous researches are described, and then the theoretical and content framework of urban governance according to the model proposed by Sandusky and Barroso is proposed. The community studied in this research included 75 scientific-research articles focusing on urban governance in the period of 2015-2015.With the investigations obtained from the analysis of the published articles, it was found that there are methodological uncertainties in many articles. The main stream of studies in this field is made up of quantitative articles with a survey strategy and using descriptive analyzes of basic statistics and correlation analysis. In terms of time, 38% of reviewed articles were published in 2016 and 29% in 2018. From the perspective of the specialized field, 58% of the articles were compiled with the participation of geography and urban planning experts and 23% of the articles were compiled by urban planning researchers. More than 32 magazine titles have published articles in the field of governance. The scale of analysis of the articles was at different levels of neighborhood, inner city area, city and country, and 80% of the articles were assigned to the city scale. In terms of content, responsibility and accountability, effectiveness, participation, transparency and rule of law are among the most important indicators in the field of urban governance.