Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) in Tehran Comprehensive Plan of Transportation and Traffic: An Approach Toward Achieving Sustainable Urban Development Projects

Believe in environmental reform is one of the sources of urban planning and probably is the most important and stable ideology of it. Urban rapid advancement in all realms especially during last two decades led various urban designs to reinforce harmony of urban development. On the other hand, emerge of some contexts such as sustainability and need of adoptability of urban designs with environmental factors caused new terms to create such as strategic environmental assessment.in this study; the origin of theoretical model of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) will be presented. Moreover the practical circumstances of mentioned model in sustainable urban designs will analyzed. Therefore, the process of urban development designs can be optimized and the appropriate system to reach sustainability can be introduced. Transportation and traffic comprehensive plan of Tehran is the case study of the research due to its importance and adoptability to the contents of sustainable development. So, the technique taken to gain information, categorize their factors which affect sustainability is the Delphi technique. In addition, ICOLD Matrix is used to analyze the strategies of transportation comprehensive plan of Tehran with the factors of sustainability. The results of present research conform that the Strategies of Transportation and traffic comprehensive plan of Tehran needs refinement to reach the factors of sustainability. On the other hand, the process of SEA in planning period to achieve sustainable and optimum strategies is considered inevitable.