This paper investigates the status of urban design research in Iran following its formal constitution in 1968 in the University of Tehran, Iran. To do this, the paper takes a hard look at the last 40 years, exposing the most serious attempts to synthesize and contextualized significance lines of inquiry in urban design researches in Iranian context. While each attempt has much to commend it, variously exhibiting great insight, dedication, knowledge and scholarship, I feel that the collective result has been a generalized anarchy of ideas borrowed from western context that bear little coherence, either internally or collectively, regarding the language of space in Iranian cities. Due to the major line of inquiry was contextualized in the direction of architectural and some partly urban planning disciplines, the hypothesis explored following this abstract proposes that there has been no concerted attempt within the discipline to link the material creation or ‘designing’ of urban space and form to fundamental societal processes (Madanipour 1996). This can be linked to many causes - historical, academic, egocentric, ideological, lack of professional identity and status, as well as misplaced idealism. More importantly, these two disciplines, mainly architecture, direct us to the aesthetic dimension of urban form that are unrelated and divorced from any economic, political , cultural or social base. In so doing, urban design generally should exit the nefarious middle ground allocated to it by architecture and planning (Talen 2009). Instead, it can connect directly to socio-spatial processes which structure social life. Therefore, urban design researches should be viewed in line with these processes which contextualize social production of space in its material and symbolic dimensions. This will pave the way for context-based approach in urban design research in Iran and other cases as well.
