Knowledge Management in a Public Entity in the Area of Urban Regeneration: The Importance of Stakeholder Participation

Every city has pockets of underutilized land or distressed and decaying urban areas. It is necessary to adopt new solutions and strategies to revitalize these areas. As a member and secretariat of national urban regeneration headquarter, Iran’s Urban Regeneration Corporation (URC), is supposed to tackle the issue of decline urban decay within the national plan of revitalization, rehabilitation and renewal, and empowerment of underutilized areas. Given its crucial role in the development of the country, URC has designed its knowledge management system, to pursue efficiency and efficacy, by involving all its employees, managers, consultants, as well as key people like policy makers, developers, facilitators, and community members. More in details, URC decided to build its system with a great emphasis on the knowledge transferred to and from external stakeholders, trying to engage them in all its processes. Indeed, as regeneration is a long term, transformative process that entails disruption and risk, it is essential to manage the change process so that all stakeholders feel engaged, understand its importance to the future and have genuine outlets to participate. A three-dimensional approach was adopted to ensure stakeholder participation. Through mainstreaming, the stakeholders became knowledgeable and able to identify their responsibilities, roles within the UR process. Through networking, several two-way knowledge transfer mechanisms were developed to improve information flow among participants and thereby making more informed decisions. Through institutionalization, stakeholders empowered to manage the entire decision process through localized institutions and to disseminate their learnings to other decision levels. URC has started to promote its experience and is seeking for more solutions (online applications for evaluation and control, experience documentation, standardization of the processes, etc.) helping to create more efficient decision processes not only for itself but also for other public as well as private entities in Iran and abroad.