Extended Abstract
Background and Objectives: The increase in population and the growing demand for residential and activity space has made the use and building rights the most valuable resource, and has greatly increased the competition between land owners, developers, capital owners and government and public agencies to acquire this resource (in fact, land property rights) in the city. On the one hand, Intensified use and development of urban land in the past few decades has created significant externalities and social costs, including air pollution, shortage of and pressure on public infrastructure and services, and traffic congestion, and then resulted in public rights violation, reduced quality of life, and intensified spatial inequality in the city. On the other hand, the spatial planning system including Tehran Municipality has been established to resolve the conflict of interests between private rights and public interests through preparing development plans and defining, distributing and allocating the land use and density in the city optimally, but this goal has not been achieved.
Therefore, one of the most important challenges faced by Tehran’s spatial planning system today is the inequality in allocation of land development rights. Determining and assigning rights by land property rights regime, as a part of the institutional environment for the production of space process, ultimately determines this process and its result, and paying attention to it is crucial for spatial planners. According to the problem statement, the main question of the article is what causal powers and generative mechanisms affect the determination and allocation of land property rights and duties in Tehran? How is spatial planning linked with land property rights?
Therefore, The main subject of this article is the relationship and interaction between spatial planning and land property rights institutions and its aim is to identify the causal powers and generative mechanisms of determining and allocating the right to develop and use of land (the hidden and real layer of space production) in Tehran and to present a conceptual framework explaining how to determine and allocate them, in order to explain why and how this mode of space production in the city.

Methods: After systematic reviewing the literature on rights and property rights in spatial planning, urban political economy, new institutional economics, new institutionalism and institutional theory, and through the multiple qualitative methodology based on Critical Realism, a data analysis framework was developed that used critical grounded theory as a coding strategy and retroduction to identify and analyze the causal powers and generative mechanisms of determining and allocating land property rights and duties in Tehran.The data was collected by conducting 23 semi-structured interviews with key expert actors and reviewing the documents of 29 laws approved by the National and Islamic Council parliament, the Revolutionary Council and the Council of Ministers (1905-2022), 29 regulations of the Supreme Council of Urban Planning and Architecture of Iran (1965-2022). 50 samples of Tehran’s Article 5 Commission regulations from 2011 to 2021, 10 key resolutions of Tehran City Council (1999-2022) and 18 decisions of the Administrative Court of Justice (1984-2022).

Findings: After completing the pre-coding steps, including data collection and transcribing the interviews, data coding was done in three coding stages: initial/open coding, axial coding, and finally (critical) retroductive coding. In the first round of c1oding, 723 primary codes were extracted from the text of the interviews and 335 primary codes were extracted from documents. In the second round of coding, by combining the extracted codes from two sources and through an iterative process and constant comparison, the codes were sub-categorized, categorized, and finally subcategories and categories were extracted. And then, in the third round of retroductive coding, the relationship between categories and subcategories was examined, and by returning from the abstract level of categories and subcategories to the concrete level of data, generative mechanisms and causal powers were identified. In fact, land property rights and duties in Tehran (even the basic land rights) are not defined, given. The structural causal powers of resources/power, discourse, coalitions of agents and regulatory causal powers of institutions and rules in interaction are the main forces through the three governance structures of the market, hierarchy and network and the three coordination mechanisms of contract and agreement; regulatory/coercive and normative; and trust and cooperation (coalition/mutual dependence), by the rules of the spatial planning system, exercise power in determining and allocating the rights and duties of land in Tehran.

Conclusion: The results of the research show that the determination and allocation of land property rights and duties in Tehran is a strategic exchange transaction between the spatial planning system and citizens, which is the result of the interaction of contextual, structural, discursive, institutional and agential causal powers and related generative mechanisms. These interactions within the planning system, in its institutional environment and the context of Tehran, has formed the “ Tehran’s land property rights regime” and its output is the production of space. In fact, the causal powers of political economy, discourses, institutions, and individual or coalition actions of actors are applied through relevant generative mechanisms, and cause the determination and allocation of land rights and duties by mediating the rules and regulations of the spatial planning system.Based on the research findings and adopting the property rights approach to spatial planning, a new definition of spatial planning is presented as follows: “Spatial planning is knowledge of strategic collective action of determining, distributing and allocating the land and space property rights and duties optimally with the aim of guiding and allocating other resources of production in certain territories. Spatial planning to achieve the goal of a sustainable city and spatial order deals with the institutional design, development and change of land property rights institution”.