Recognizing Iran's Cultural Regions: Towards a Conceptual and Methodological Framework

Strategic planners emphasize cultural diversity in regional planning, but it's not adequately addressed in important documents like the "National Land Use Document." To safeguard against potential repercussions such as heightened cultural inequality and the resulting erosion of the distinctive Iranian identity, some documents are being assembled in conjunction with the aforementioned document. The following article is taken from research that was carried out to compile the mentioned document and to conceptualize and recognize the cultural regions of Iran. The purpose of this article is to prepare the conceptual foundations and achieve a methodological framework to recognize the cultural regions of Iran and to get the answer to the question of what indices can be used to define and distinguish the cultural regions of Iran and to represent and preserve their integrity in the form of a national cultural region. To do this, library and comparative study methods were used, along with the opinions of several scientific and business experts. According to this paper’s findings, the definition of a cultural region was made by combining the three concepts of "formal culture regions," "combined formal cultural regions," and "native or vernacular cultural regions," or perceptual. Based on this research, the framework of a method for cultural regionalization is efficient if the material and non-material aspects of culture are taken into consideration at the same time and two simultaneous approaches are adopted. The cultural regionalization of Iran based on the focus of regions from the perspective of four indices of history, science, religion, and ethnicity is a practical method that has all the above features.