Evaluation of Community Management in Tehran Ararat Quarter, Based on the Indicators of Good Urban Governance

Introduction Two factors of unplanned physical growth and development of cities and their over-increased population, especially in the third world large cities, have resulted in various challenges and problems for their urban management. Therefore, large cities of the world are recently encountered with many challenges including urban management challenges, especially those of top-down management. This qualification and situation is more intensive in Iran large cities and Tehran metropolis in particular. Eradication of these problems and challenges as burden on Tehran urban management is out of management ability of Tehran. In other words, centralized top-down management system of Tehran is unable to take them away. Around urban management system in Iran and Tehran, a large number of critics have been made. In this way, urban management in Iran has a deep gap with urban governance and this management is more and more an organization or system for administration and keeping the city or giving services. Therefore, in the last two decades, a large number of organizations and agents related to urban management and planning have focused on participatory approach and management of cities by private sector and civil society based on a model of down-top management and planning.    Accordingly, based on experiences of urban local managements in the other metropolises of the world, especially community management by the indices of good urban governance, we could have hopeful to establish community management in the Tehran local communities. Hence, urban management of Tehran, after establishment of the Quarter council (Shorayari), decided to launch the plan of community management with new pattern. The pattern is with the approach of good urban governance and has been more applied in metropolises to bring about a better, non-concentrated and democratic management. By the way, this paper has surveyed and analyzed the qualification of good urban governance indicators in Ararat quarter in the region 3 of Tehran municipality. This was to discover the ratio and situation in each of these indicators.   Methodology This research has a descriptive-analytical method and questionnaire was used as a tool for measurement. Statistical population of the research includes specialized experts in the field of urban management or planning. Accordingly, after the items were extracted, using Likert scale, the questioning trend was began by questioning from the quarters selected experts on the subject of urban management and planning. In this investigation, sample size is 20 people, sampling mode is nonprobability sampling and research type is applied method. Thus, the researches in which the statistical population includes experts, when this population has no known framework, the research can be by selective method. However, the achieved data were analyzed by T test for the first hypothesis and Friedman test for the second one by the SPSS software. Results and Discussion In this paper, after examination of the related studies and surveys based on modes and patterns of urban management and community management in Iran and based on the theoretical literature, 8 indices of good urban governance were chosen to analyze community management. These indices are including 1. participation, 2. Answering, 3. Responsibility, 4. Regularity, 5. Unity, 6. Equity, 7. Transparency, and 8. Effectiveness. Among the 8 indices of the research in the study area of this research, the function of 5 indices is non-proper in the field of community management. In other words, except 3 indices of participation, answering and effectiveness, function average of 5 other indices is lower than the score of the tests numerical optimality, i.e., score 3. For the first hypothesis, according to the results, there is a significant difference between data mean for all 8 indicators of the research. The under-studied quarter has thoroughly a relatively-good state with significance level of less than error rate of 0.001 with the function of good urban governance indicators, but in detail, 5 out of 8 indicators have a mean lower than the total average (i.e. 3) which is a non-good or poor state. In the second hypothesis, because participation and answering indicators belong to primate indicators with a mean more than the mediocre mean, consequently, this hypothesis was confirmed by confidence level of 99 percent. Conclusion It should be mentioned that, community management of the studied quarter is non-proper and poor. Along these lines, the function of indices of good urban governance in the study area, i. e. Ararat quarter of the region 3 on the extent of Tehran municipality is very poor and all the indices have generally less impact on the community management of the above-mentioned quarter. The basic result is that, the answering index has the most function and the equity index has the least function in the community management of the study area. If we decide to give a score to the indices of good urban governance in the study area (Ararat Quarter) and the top score is 8, the score of the area will be 3 out of 8. This shows a poor function for overall indices of good urban governance. Therefore, the agents of community management in the quarter must try to develop all these indices to achieve better community management.