Journal of Researches in Islamic Architecture

In this paper, the management of Islamic cities in the urban economic spaces and also the contemporary cities are viewed from three different looks:

First, the history of urban management through corporate institutions; second,  the modern systems in European and American cities such as BID (Business Improvement District); and third, structural changes and urban management in the business space of the cities during Pahlavi I and II eras. 

Through the first look at the history of the rule of the cities and urban management during the Islamic rule, we encounter structures and institutions whose main characteristic was self-autonomy against the government; sometimes they were also a coordinator between people and the government. Corporate councils and organizations governed the economic system of the cities which had its own special hierarchy such as corporate masters including workers, and students and a trustful elderly acknowledged by the city sheriff deputy and head of the corporate and neighborhoods who was introduced by the city sheriff. These institutions were functioning properly at the time; hence, corporate councils played a significant role in management of the cities and neighborhoods and specially the bazaars, independent of business organizations. These councils which were located near bazaars and mosques facilitated rising of Khums and Zakat or urban tax-collection system.

The first major, and obvious, question in a discussion of BID reforms is what “governance” and “good governance” mean. Despite its popularity the concept of “governance “is highly ambiguous and excessively broad, and has remained so today notwithstanding numerous attempts to clarify it. Indeed the elasticity of the concept is suggested as the key to its attraction, as some thinkers traces the intellectual context of the emergence of “governance” in academic and policy discourse: the notion of “governance” had an a priori attractiveness as it could refer to complexities entailing a good deal more than administration or management, namely the element of political restructuring and the handling of this, while at the same time including the administrative-management dimension. It opened the window for a focus on how “politics” or the political process was conducted and embedded within larger structures. The concept introduces the political dimension into an otherwise technocratic discourse of public issues but in such a way that allows more flexibility than an explicitly political approach. In practice, it enables the user to maintain a camouflage of political neutrality when necessary as governance discussions span the vast space between the political technical continuums and may hence be adjusted more towards one end or the other as circumstances require. The expansiveness of the concept goes further as governance literally can mean many different things to different people. We must summarizes the diverse meanings in the dimensions of substantive content and character. Along the first are those who define governance as basically the rules of conducting public business on one end, and those who see governance as the activities of steering public affairs on the other. The second dimension contrasts those who emphasize governance as process, and those who see governance as results or outcomes of public decision-making. Each of the various meanings – rules, steering, process or outcome – consists of highly variable contents.

To improve the business, corporate, spatial, and local auto governed and participation of all stake holders of the corporate in urban spaces, BID is proved to be effective in European and American countries. Proportionate to such changes, the urban management changed from the traditional methods of the corporate councils to corporate unities and corporate and the relevant state offices and corporate unities played a significant role in management of the corporate sections of the cities.

Since the 1990s, planning engagement with urban governance has sought to theorize space, scale and state strategy through multi scaled analysis of political and economic activity as a series of situated and context specific processes. A focus on multiple spatiality’s of state activities has led to ‘strategic-relational’ consideration of state power as social relations via a focus on the interplay between institutional forms and political forces. This approach shies away from focusing on national institutional structures and/or individual actors or organizations, instead considering ‘local political leadership’ in order to theorize broader structural changes. In reviewing geographical work on Islamic urban regime theory, regulation, growth coalitions and so on, which has considered how urban politics and policy are formed through public-sector and private sector coalitions of power which shape the ruling shows that research has concentrated on ‘functional equivalences’, not comparing institutions/actors but instead comparing similar modes, patterns and processes of governance.

Based on the past experiences of the entities managing economic sections of the cities and incomplete Modernism experience of urban development in the last 90 years, the paper attempts to localize and develop a new approach such as BID based of Iran conditions and experiences in order to assist the management efficiency of Iranian cities