An Analysis of Conflicts in The Face of Urban Historic Areas Planning Based Upon Grounded Theory (Case Study: Historic Area of Rey City in Tehran)

Urban historic area as a living witness of the history of the past and the main factor in community identity is a context for residency and activities of a wide range of stakeholders with different and sometimes conflicting goals and interests and a platform for conflicting forces of "development" and "conservation" that leads to different types of conflicts. This paper tries to identify and analyze conflicts toward planning of urban historic areas as a basis for conflict management. This study is qualitative that the required data has been collected by snowball sampling, record/document analysis and in-depth interviews and analyzed based upon grounded theory. Findings show that the key conflicts toward planning of urban historic area of Rey include “conflict between conservation and development”, “stakeholder conflict”, “spatial conflict”, “environmental conflict” and “social conflict” that can be classified in three categories including “conflicts in urban historic areas”, “conflicts through conservation plans” and “conflicts through urban development plans”. The weakness of conservation planning and management system and the inefficiency of development planning and management system in historic areas at decision-making level are the key factors in the confrontation of development and conservation that lead to the emergence of secondary conflicts at operational level. Identifying conflicts and causes, moving from power-based urban conservation approaches toward stakeholder-based approaches, using approaches like conflict-sensitive conservation, right to heritage and integrating urban conservation into broader context of urban planning at policy-making level can result in conflict resolution and conservation-led integrative development at operational level in historic areas.