Designing a Hypothetical Neighborhood to Promote the Localism; Convergence of Urban Village Approach and Democratic Urban Design: The Link between Theory and Practice

The "Urban Village Approach" is one of the most appropriate ways to eliminate recent urban problems, including social, environmental, cultural, and economic shortcomings. Although the urban village approach is generally proper to resolve these types of flaws, its combination with the democratic concept of urban design can definitely provide more effective solutions. So at first, this paper aims to present a theoretical combination of these two approaches in the form of recommended principles and criteria, and then attempts to introduce a hypothetical wasteland for illustrating the practical aspects of it through design suggestions. A major part of the achievements of this paper is based on theoretical and empirical findings obtained from comparisons and descriptions, but in order to achieve more tangible results, the practical aspects of findings are proven by displaying 3D designs and schemes. Consequently, these proposed principles and criteria can be utilized in designing a democratized urban village form that finally leads to some vital qualities, such as flexibility, inclusiveness, localism, diversity, vitality, naturality, identity, etc. These qualities, in an appropriate and consistent relation with the existing contexts, will also bring some desired concepts within, like justice, equality, freedom, and democracy to the urban and rural areas and neighborhoods.