Natural disasters affect the performance of urban and regional systems in various forms. Problems caused by unpredictability of the environmental changes can cause inefficiency in short and long-term planning strategies. The importance of avoiding this indicates the necessity of applying appropriate approaches to problem solving in metropolitan planning as well as in disaster management. The process of disaster management and planning in metropolitan areas differ from other urban levels. These difference may be due to such reasons as (a) the importance of responding to disasters in all spatial aspects including social, economic, and physical aspects, (b) the need to act promptly by various stakeholders and players involved in disaster situations and (c) unclearness of the problem which both planning and management systems (i.e., metroplolitan planning and disaster management) have to deal with. It is based on these reasons that the establishment of an integrated disaster management and planning system is crucial specifically in metropolitan areas. Such an integrated planning activity comprises both substantive and procedural aspects including integrated metroplolitan planning and disaster management strategies as well as producing an integrated "spatial metropolitan and disaster management plan" plus specifying the role, functioning and responsibilities of the varied actors active in such an environment. Tehran (the capital of Iran), a metropolis with more than eight million residents within its statutory boundaries and more than 13 million people residing in Tehran province as the urban region of Tehran, is prone to disasters, that the most important of them would be a severe earthquake. While the last devastating earthquake of Tehran occurred in about mid 1880's, according to studies on the return period of earthquakes, it is estimated that an earthquake with the magnitude of 7 to 8 Richter scale would occur sometime in Tehran in an undefined future. In this respect launching an efficient, while an integrated, planning and disaster management system is a major and crucial concern of policy making in Tehran. Accordingly, this paper has adopted a dual aim of (a) analysing the existing situation of Tehran in terms of disaster management as against metropolitan planning including an identification of the strengths and weaknesses of such a situation, and (b) envisaging the ways and means of integrating the two parallel but highly inter-related areas of metropolitan planning and disaster management.
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