Strategic Planning for Reviving the Natural Environment of Tehran River Valleys (Case Study: Darakeh River Valley)

During the recent decades, Tehran County has faced a considerable growth in urbanites. This huge rate of urbanism and subsequently land using for urban habitancy without taking the environment potentials into account has caused serious consequences and has led to environment destruction in Tehran; disorganizing the balance between the county and the environment. Urban river valleys; as one of the elements of ecologic structure of the cities, can play an efficient role in creating balance between the human made city structure and the nature, but the widespread use has caused a hyper-pressure to the nature, resulting in waste of nature elements like trees, vegetation, water pollution, etc. Thus providing and increasing amusing places, planning natural environments in order to save and revive natural ecosystems and optimum exploitation of them looks totally vital. This paper is of descriptive- analytical and is based on SWOT strategic analysis combinational model and QSPM strategic planning model. This research has explored the process of planning for reviving the natural environment of river valleys in Tehran County and has studied Darakeh river valley as a case study. Performing field studies and reviewing records, this paper provides some strategies in order to plan for reviving the natural environment of this river valley based on facilities and opportunities, limitations and threats. The results of the research shows that the selected QSPM strategies is of the highest priority with an attraction scores of 6.048 among the other five strategies; i.e. selective strategy, protection strategy, reviving strategy, strengthening vegetation strategy and natural settlements strategy.