تبارشناسی استراتژی‌های قدرت برای مشروعیت بخشی و مشروعیت زدایی در عمل برنامه‌ریزی شهری؛ (مطالعه موردی: بازنگری طرح بهسازی و نوسازی بافت پیرامون حرم مطهر امام رضا (ع))

Introduction: Postmodernists adopt a critical approach to power and legitimacy by challenging the idealistic normative criteria of rationality and democracy as the basis for justifying planning decisions in an era where power is all-pervasive. To address the need for a power-sensitized understanding of the nature of legitimacy, this paper addresses the critical yet little-understood issue of how power shapes the construction of legitimacy in planning practice. Based on Foucault's genealogy, the paper proposes a conceptual framework for studying the influence of power strategies on the legitimacy of planning decisions. This framework advances our understanding of the relationship between power and legitimacy by showing how actors in real decision-making situations use strategies and counter-strategies to control the conduct of others. As a result of the strategic game, the procedures of Normalization construct subjugated subjects who decide upon claims and counter-claims of legitimacy. Methodology: This article proposes a conceptual framework for genealogical analysis of the power-legitimacy nexus. This framework analyzes the interplay between power and legitimacy through:

Identifying Legitimacy Conflicts: Mapping disputes over the legitimacy of urban planning decisions.
Articulating Claims/Counterclaims: Systematizing competing legitimacy assertions within these conflicts.
Analyzing Power Strategies: Examining how actors (with defined privileges, objectives, and institutional tools, grounded in rational 
Postmodernists adopt a critical approach to power and legitimacy by challenging the idealistic normative criteria of rationality and democracy as the basis for justifying planning decisions in an era where power is all-pervasive. To address the need for a power-sensitized understanding of the nature of legitimacy, this paper addresses the critical yet little-understood issue of how power shapes the construction of legitimacy in planning practice. Based on Foucault's genealogy, the paper proposes a conceptual framework for studying the influence of power strategies on the legitimacy of planning decisions. This framework advances our understanding of the relationship between power and legitimacy by showing how actors in real decision-making situations use strategies and counter-strategies to control the conduct of others. As a result of the strategic game, the procedures of Normalization construct subjugated subjects who decide upon claims and counter-claims of legitimacy.
Methodology: This article proposes a conceptual framework for genealogical analysis of the power-legitimacy nexus. This framework analyzes the interplay between power and legitimacy through:

Identifying Legitimacy Conflicts: Mapping disputes over the legitimacy of urban planning decisions.
Articulating Claims/Counterclaims: Systematizing competing legitimacy assertions within these conflicts.
Analyzing Power Strategies: Examining how actors (with defined privileges, objectives, and institutional tools, grounded in rational justifications within specific social institutions) deploy strategies/counter-strategies to enforce acceptance of legitimacy claims.
Interpreting Normalization: Tracing how new norms emerge post-conflict, compelling subjects to reconfigure their actions and behaviors (subjectification).

This strategic analysis framework is applied to legitimacy conflicts during the revision of Samen District's Urban Renewal Plan (2014-2020).
Choosing this case is based on the Deviant Case Sampling strategy. The complicated, long struggle for the justification of plan revision represents the most clear-cut instance of the effect of power on legitimacy. The data originated from 10 narrative in-depth interviews, 212 official documents (planning documents, official correspondence, approvals, reports of official meetings), and 563 unofficial documents (press reports of official interviews, official meetings, official speeches, reports of official websites of the institutions). In the process of the research, transferability, credibility, confirmability, and dependability are considered to ensure validity.
Results: The genealogy of the Revision of Samen District's Urban Renewal Plan demonstrates the active roles of actors in the conflict over the legitimization and delegitimization of the fundamental revision of the plan. During the revision process, actors engage in a strategic game that creates unfinished struggles regarding the decision to maintain or change the main structure of the plan. Strategies and counter-strategies to control and win the conflict over the revision justification shift the formal planning struggle to an informal juridical one with its process, actors, criteria, and characteristics. In consequence, most parts of the main structure of the plan remain unchanged in the revised plan despite the initial official decision.
Discussion: The genealogy of the Revision of Samen District's Urban Renewal Plan demonstrates the active roles of actors in the conflict over the legitimization and delegitimization of the fundamental revision of the plan. During the revision process, actors engage in a strategic game that creates unfinished struggles regarding the decision to maintain or change the main structure of the plan. Strategies and counter-strategies to control and win the conflict over the revision justification shift the formal planning struggle to an informal juridical one, with its ow process, actors, criteria, and characteristics. Consequently, most parts of the main structure of the plan remain unchanged in the revised plan despite the initial official decision. This study demonstrates that power struggles in strategic games intentionally create context-based, ongoing conflicts over the legitimacy of decisions. In these conflicts, the legitimization of decisions is determined by the strategic game controlled by powerful actors, who set the rules based on the situation and conditions. In this context, power is exercised through two different strategies: First, strategies to challenge the legitimacy of the decisions, decision-makers, the procedure of decision-making, norms of decision-making, and decision consequences. Applying these strategies leads to creating conflicts on legitimacy. Second, strategies to manage legitimacy conflicts. By using these strategies, power was mainly gained and control maintained over struggles. The strategic game of power in planning practice constructs subjugated subjects who are obedient to the new normalization of the decisions, decision-makers, the procedure of decision-making, norms of decision-making, and decision consequences. In planning practice, decisions are often not challenged based on criteria accepted by society, such as ethical, legal, or scientific considerations. Instead, the pragmatic rationality of power finds alternative ways that are considered more practical to legitimize or delegitimize decisions. Speeding up the implementation of the Samen District's urban renewal project to practically eliminate the rational possibility of plan revisions illustrates how power deviates from the idealistic path to planning legitimacy. Furthermore, strategies of power can alter or adjust formal decision-making processes embedded within bureaucratic planning systems. The case study shows that actors not only limit themselves to making decisions within preset and established mechanisms but also utilize a variety of semi-formal and informal procedures. The power struggle determines which process is ultimately legitimized. In addition to the decision-making process, the legitimacy of the decision-makers is also contested. The exercise of power plays a crucial role in deciding who is authorized to make decisions on a particular issue and who is not. Including or excluding actors from the decision-making process is a direct result of strategies and counter-strategies of power, which can either delegitimize actors in their current positions or grant legitimacy to new ones.
Conclusion: This research proposes an empirical perspective on planning legitimacy that differs from prescriptive approaches. It challenges the view that the legitimacy of urban planning can be determined merely on the basis of predetermined normative criteria. According to this empirical view, planning legitimacy in practice is constructed through complex and reciprocal relationships with power. Furthermore, the results indicate that the application of power strategies engenders a process of normalization that facilitates subjectification. This process destabilizes what had been accepted and normalized within urban planning mechanisms as legitimate, customary, and acceptable, subsequently replacing it with new normalized practices. The outcome is the normalization of new decisions, processes, actors, criteria, and consequences deemed legitimate and acceptable. Subjects then find themselves compelled to align their actions accordingly. Within the process of revising the Samen District's urban renewal plan, the "judicialization of decision-making" gradually becomes normalized. This normalization enables the steering of subjects' actions (subjectification) toward acceptance of increased judicial interventions in the urban planning decision-making process. This underscores the fundamental impact of strategic power play in the reconfiguration of legitimacy perceptions within urban planning practice. This new understanding of legitimacy in urban planning practice requires further study to clarify its complex dimensions.