The Planiran.com approach to planning

روش برنامه‌ ریزی برنامه ایران

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Posted by Rezwan • Apr 06, 2009 • (0) Comments •
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This website explores and creates a grand vision for iran. It also develops actual plans for Iran to turn this vision into a reality. How do we do this?


From blog to collaborative planning space
Our conceptual priorities

• Vision
• Participants
• Context
• Theory
• Sustainability
• Planning Elements
• Tools
• Education
• Etc.

From blog to collaborative planning space

We believe the planner has the obligation to educate themselves in public. As such, the entries start out as drafts. At first there will be more questions than answers, until we fill in the missing information.

These drafts will improve with feedback from you! They will be continually revised with your input, until we get to where we’re going.

Planiran is not intended to be a blog, although it may feel like it at first. We’re trying to move away from “blog” and toward creating a collaborative environment that supports planning and debate of key issues.

As we write about issues, we’ll get feedback, then hone these issues down into action steps,and actual plan proposals.

Whether anyone carries out the plans we develop remains to be seen. If many people share the emerging vision, there is a good chance that the plans will be carried out also.

The point is, planning is a natural process, and you don’t need to be an official person in an official capacity to do it. A plan is simply a statement of a vision, and the policies, programs and implementation measures that are required to turn that vision into reality.

A plan is like a screenplay. It’s something written on paper. A blueprint for development: the screenplay is a blueprint for the development of a movie, the plan is the blueprint for development of a community. If enough people are excited by the screenplay, they pay good money to turn it into a movie. If enough people are excited by a plan, they get involved and pass laws and divert funds and make things happen.

Our conceptual priorities:

Take a look at our navigation bar. It lays out the priorities of our site. After "Home" and "About", we have the following main categories:

Vision - Participants - Context - Theory - Sustainability - Planning Elements - Tools - Fun - Education - Jobs etc.

There's a reason for this.

It all starts with the vision.

Vision:

After “Home” and “About”, “Vision” is our first navigation category. That’s because the first step in any planning process is the vision, the purpose.

Before you can plan, you have to have an answer to the question “What are we really trying to DO here, anyway?”

What do we want? What does it LOOK like?

I have found in my dealings with fellow Iranians, that vision is often not explored. When asked what you want, you usually answer in the negative. What you don’t want. Death to this, death to that, but LIFE to WHAT? What does the ideal Iran we want to live in look like?

Participants:

Wait a minute. Whose vision? Who are WE? Who are YOU? Who am I? Who are THEY?

You will notice from the navigation bar on this site that, after “Vision”, we move to “Participants”. A key consideration, a key factor in planning is people. People are the actors, the ones doing the actual planning, and the ones reacting to the forces of nature surrounding them, the ones reacting to laws and to each other. They are the ones that may or may not actually carry out the plans. The ones that oppose you or support you.

In Iran, there tends to be an organic (rather than mechanistic) view of government. That means government is seen as a parent figure, the entity that decides what’s best for people and tries to make it happen. People tend to be seen as objects of planning. There is a lot of talk about “participation”, but a woeful lack of understanding of the role of people in planning.

This segment takes a good hard look at participants, and their interrelationships. You will notice that we have included “citizens”, “government” and “firms” as participants, as well as NGO’s. All of these entities interact and often overlap. It is their cooperation and collaboration that makes plans come to life. Thus this section explores their characteristics and dynamics.

Context:

Following “Participants”, we take a look at the context. We are in Iran. Iran has specific environmental, economic, social, and political issues. It has a unique history. It is the way it is because of many specific factors. We need to understand these factors if we’re going to plan.

This section explores the environmental, technological, and social history of Iran. It tries to answer the question “How did we get here?” so that we can figure out what our options are from this point forward.

Here, we explore our assets and liabilities, and take a good long look at our institutions, the legal system, informal systems of interaction, and so forth. These all have an effect on any plans we develop, so we need to understand them.

Theory:

To manage all the information we’re accumulating, we need to put it into some sort of theoretical framework.

This website favors the emerging field of “Institutional economics” and will take a “coordinating collaboration” approach to planning. Our theoretical preferences will be listed here so that they can be discussed.

Other theories and ideas that have specific relevance to Iran will be explored here as well. The aim of this section is to develop and a clear theoretical framework to inform planning in Iran.

Ideally, we will move from narrative fallacies and into testable theoretical grounds, although narrative fallacies may have a useful role to play. At least according to the “political mythology” approach, which we will explore here.

Sustainability

Whatever plans we make, we want them to be sustainable. We are at a critical juncture in the history of civilization, and sustainability is the key framework around which this debate is framed. What is sustainability? How are we compromising it?

What is the vision of sustainability for Iran? Can we go beyond “sustainable” to “thriving?” Or even further, to “Eden?” The word “paradise” is Persian. Can we turn Iran back into some sort of paradise?

Planning Elements

And finally, we get to the section that covers what people usually think of when they think of planning. These are the elements of planning, including land use, circulation (aka traffic), open space, noise, safety, housing, the economy and so forth.

I have put these sections after vision, participants, context, theory and sustainability because the former are the meta issues, the background assumptions that affect plannning. These elements, then, are the concrete areas on which plans are drafted.

Tools

And now, we reach the section on tools. You are no doubt expecting links to the latest GIS software and Delphi and input output models. That’ll be there, too, eventually. But first, we’ll address more important issues.

Here you will also see our bias. The primary skills required by a planner, in our view, are social skills and problem solving skills. Language and public speaking skills are also a plus, especially if you want to wade through all the reports, or develop a good, persuasive speech to convince people of your plan. Our universities in Iran are biased towards engineering and math skills, resulting in people with great equation solving abilities who come up with really inhuman suggestions to planning problems. But the math is right!

Fun:

Planning is fun. What joy to be alive and shape your world! To find people who share your vision! It can also be funny, as the comedy of error of life and planning unfolds around us. We laugh at others, we laugh at our own mistakes. Life, laughter, zoning.

Education:

Well, I’ve added this on by popular demand. It might have been put under “tools”, but it has its own section here. We’ve split education into four segments, community education (developing materials for the community), university plan (improving the planning education available in Iran), architects and planners. For the latter, we will attempt to furnish links to educational programs abroad for continuing education.

Etc.

And then, jobs, books, links, etc. I'm not sure how well I can hook you up with jobs. But I'll try. The books and links will be useful. Most will be referenced from within the articles we post, but it's nice to have them all in a separate location as well.

Now that we have the categories, we need to supply the content. Your feedback and suggestions are most welcome!

Let the planning begin!

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