Investigating the Indicators of Good Urban Governance in Facilitation Projects in Iran

Good urban governance is a concept that aims to harmonize and direct the strength of society. It tries to create an atmosphere to develop society’s goals through participation in different aspects by implementing transparency and accountability. In this regard, informing people about urban plans and decisions is necessary. People should be able to comment on urban decisions in a communicative context. A fast rate of urbanization worldwide caused reduced direct communication between people and authorities. So, informing people and teaching them how to communicate with urban managers leads to a better balance between demand and supply, plus identifying needs based on contextual data. To facilitate this process, some groups are employed by organizations to facilitate more effective communication with people. The projects they worked on included renovation and rehabilitation, reducing crime by enabling local businesses, informal settlement issues, and so on. In this project, the challenges of the communication with both people and authorities have been considered by considering the necessary role of such groups. Sixteen deep semi-structured interviews with the members of the aforementioned groups have been done in five different cities in Iran, and two interviews have been conducted with two urban authorities to find the right questions. MaxQDA2020 has analyzed the results of interviews in the format of charts. The results show the main challenge of these groups is communication with authorities. In some cases, replacing authority sources or changing policies causes an ignorance of their field achievements. On the other hand, such groups are not recognized thoroughly by authorities, so achieving the goals of projects is progressing slowly, and many challenges are being faced.