The Dispute between Physicalism and Culture: Cultural Implications in the View of Tehran’s Comprehensive Development Plan

Abstract

The present study has been conducted with the objective of elaborating the cultural implications in the view of Tehran's comprehensive development plan based on content analysis method. The study seeks finding an answer to the question as to how much does Tehran's development vision plan include the cultural issues in the metropolitan setting? The realm of the current research is the entire contents of the second five-year development plan of Tehran's municipality (2014-2018). The explicit and implicit themes indicating the culture-related issues have been separated and, considering their interrelationships, the explicit themes have been explored. The information gathering instrument was the content analysis checklist and its reliability was confirmed by external auditors based on convergence coefficient in the course of coding. The results indicated that a considerable part of Tehran's development plan is directed at modern morphological and structural elements, urban requirements, civil development and urban control and supervision policies and supervision and a lower deal of attention has been paid to the cultural, hypothetical and soft topics. These findings show that Tehran is still trapped in physicalist development and expanding culture decline.