Participatory Assessment of urban land uses: a map-based voting approach

Urban land uses determined solely based on experts’ opinions, perspectives, expertise and desires may not meet local people’s needs and may be subject to conflict and opposition. Some of the stakeholders may fully agree with the current expert-based land uses and some may completely disagree. This study presents a systematic map-based voting approach to select the best uses for the lands based on the stakeholders’ preferences and compare them with current expert-oriented land uses. The proposed method was utilized for assessing the uses of urban land parcels in District # 15 of Tehran, Iran. The results show that the participatory and expert-driven land uses are different for six parcels out of ten, which implies that the land use preferences of the local stakeholders/citizens are not compatible with that of the experts for all of the land parcels.