A Pathological Study of Urban Design Skills’ Non-formal Training in Iran, Case Study: Tehran Municipality

In today’s world, one of the cities’ major challenges is the crisis of the built environment quality. As the urban design group discussed, urban management (local authorities) actors are kind of urban designers who unconsciously affect the quality of urban environment by their decisions. Non-formal Education and in-service training programs are effective methods to qualify staff for making decisions about the built environment. However, observations have proven that, on the contrary to our expectation, the consequences of these programs do not have impressive results on Tehran’s built environment. In other words, the quality of urban places is getting worse, in spite of the increase in number of urban design training programs. So, in order to find the roots of the problem, this research has been done in three main parts: (1) Recognizing the local authorities’ influences on quality of built environment, (2) Identifying the factors which local authorities’ staff consider in decision- taking/making in regards to the built environment, (3) Pathology of non-formal training system of urban design skills. The type of research that has been used in this study is survey under a qualitative research method. The purpose of using this method is achieving an in-depth understanding of the role of Tehran municipality as a local authority in the quality of built environment. This research investigates the “why” and “how” of decisionmaking; besides, the phenomenon of urban design skills training has been examined through observation as well as some interviews and questionnaires. The survey population is the people who are involved in training programs, including learners, educators, educational managers, officers and top managers at architecture and urban planning departments. To obtain more accurate results, the research sampling method that has been used in this study is systematic and targeted sampling. The results show that the municipality staffs do not believe in their impact on the planning and development process, as well as the quality of public realm and building design outcomes. According to the results, a fundamental review is needed in urban design training programs in terms of procedure, content and curriculum.