Urban Managers' Approach to Organizing Inefficient Urban Textures: A case study of informal settlement textures in Zanjan City

ABSTRACT
Despite the passage of several decades since the process of organizing inefficient urban textures, this issue is still recognized as an emerging issue that has not only not been repeated but has also taken on new dimensions with the emergence of new issues. In this process, the success or inefficiency of the intervention is largely due to urban management, which has always been the decision-maker. This study is a mixed research (quantitative and qualitative) with an exploratory nature, whose structure is based on an inductive-interpretive framework and positivism. The study population is urban managers of Zanjan city, with experience in intervening inefficient urban textures (informal settlements), which was conducted with a sample size of 25 people based on the Q methodology. The data were analyzed qualitatively based on Q and quantitative (exploratory factor analysis) propositions. The findings show that from a total of 40 extracted Qs, 7 themes of ineffective plans, inappropriate distribution of urban resources, residents’ economy, property rights, ineffective urban management, development plans, local capacity, and urban power constitute the main concepts of intervention in informal settlement contexts. The findings of the exploratory factor analysis show that the five factors of urban power, distributive justice, economy, ineffective plans, and property rights are the main mindset and attitude of managers in dealing with inefficient contexts. The results show that urban power, with a 33 percent factor load, is considered the superior mindset of urban managers in the intervention, and they consider the best intervention method to be empowering residents to participate in urban management.
Extended Abstract
Introduction
After more than two decades of preparing and implementing plans to organize and empower inefficient urban contexts, not only have the problems of these contexts not decreased, but new challenges arising from the expansion have taken on new dimensions day by day. Informal settlements are one of the inefficient urban contexts that, despite extensive studies at the national and global levels and the preparation of various urban plans, are still on the outskirts of the urban context. Although the roots of the formation and development of these contexts are so obvious to experts that writing about them is a repetition of the material. However, the poverty transferred from the periphery (mainly rural areas) to urban areas, especially central and polar cities, has led to the fact that the transitional population, due to the lack of structural and managerial capacity of the cities, has not found the opportunity to settle and live in the city and is forced to settle in the physical outskirts of the cities in an informal manner, creating the phenomenon of marginalization and informal settlement with a multitude of problems and problems. Now the fundamental issue is what is the attitude of urban management in dealing with inefficient urban contexts such as informal settlements from the perspective of managers, and what are the reasons for the weakness of appropriate service provision, especially in the physical sector and urban services, from the perspective of managers? The present study, using the Q methodology, examines the attitude of managers in providing services to informal settlement contexts and aims to explore the mental and attitudinal perspectives of managers and urban experts in neighborhood improvement policies. The innovation of the research is in the mental assessment of managers’ perspectives and the classification of their attitudes in dealing with informal settlements in order to identify management challenges from the perspective of managers.
 
 
 
Methodology
This research is a mixed type based on qualitative and quantitative methods with an exploratory nature. The research structure is based on an inductive-interpretive and positivist philosophical framework, which is based on the Q methodology. The research population consisted of managers and middle-level experts related to urban development projects, especially the informal settlement organization projects in Zanjan city, who had been present in the executive structure of the Empowerment Headquarters for the last ten years and had information and experience dealing with organizational documents and their implementation in inefficient urban neighborhoods. Considering the cooperation of mid-level managers and experts, 25 people were selected purposefully. The Q methodology structure is in a way that increasing the number of people leads to a rupture of opinions and makes it difficult to categorize opinions. For this reason, considering the principles of the Q methodology, an attempt was made to select people and monitor their participation and cooperation. The data obtained according to the steps of the Q method were first categorized into the majority of Q options. Themes were extracted by thermalizing the discourse obtained from Q, and factor loadings were obtained using a quantitative method based on factor analysis. In order to explain and classify attitudes, factor arrays were calculated, and intervention attitudes were ranked and interpreted, as the goal of this method is to recognize mental patterns, not to count the number of people with different thoughts. Therefore, the validity study (validity of the Q method) is raised when a construct, that is, a hidden characteristic, is measured, because in such a case, the researcher is faced with the question of whether the constructed scale measures what it was built to measure. This is while the Q method study is not in the post-measurement of any construct. What can be raised about the Q study is the comprehensiveness of the Q study statements. In other words, the researcher should ask himself whether the collected statements are comprehensive and extensive enough that they can reflect different mentalities. Thus, the validity of the instrument was the result of face validity, and the researcher verified the Q options with the approval of experts and the method of sample repeatability. Considering the mixed nature of the Q method and the quantitative nature of part of the research, the reliability of the Q statements and their ordering results was obtained as 0.710 using the Cronbach's alpha method, which shows its relative suitability.
 
Results and discussion
 The present study, by examining the attitudes of experienced urban managers who have worked for years on the issue of inefficient urban contexts (including informal settlements), shows that the weakness of residents' power, their lack of presence in the decision-making structure and decision-making of urban management, low economic power, along with the inefficiency of plans and their lack of adaptation to local conditions, have led to the inefficiency of the intervention process in various dimensions, especially physical and service dimensions. According to this study, the dominant attitude of urban managers is limited to the idea of city power, in which the absence of a local representative or institution from inefficient contexts is a factor in the inappropriate distribution of resources in the process of urban development. This has led to the allocation of annual budgets by the beneficiaries of urban power, using the levers of presence, bargaining, and the exercise of power, to draw resources toward their desired urban spaces, causing an unbalanced distribution of resources and unbalanced urban development. Based on the Q-based methodology, in addition to the urban power attitude as the dominant attitude of urban managers, inappropriate distribution of resources (distributive justice), residents’ economy, inefficiency of plans, and land ownership rights have been considered as subsequent attitudes of managers in dealing with these contexts.
Conclusion
Looking at the themes obtained, the distribution of resources, the economy of residents, and property rights depend on the flow of urban power. If the urban power of the residents increases in proportion to the implementation of the operational plans, distributive justice, and the allocation of resources with context, the economy of the residents will gradually improve, and subsequent issues arising from property rights will be resolved in the process of follow-up and bargaining.
 
Funding
There is no funding support.
 
Authors’ Contribution
Authors contributed equally to the conceptualization and writing of the article. All of the authors approved the content of the manuscript and agreed on all aspects of the work declaration of competing interest none.
 
Conflict of Interest
Authors declared no conflict of interest.
 
Acknowledgments
 We are grateful to all the scientific consultants of this paper.