Sustainable development of urban River Valley based on ecological assessment (Case study: Darabad River Valley ,Tehran)

Abstract Urban parks and green spaces as a part of the urban structure must be design according to the necessities of urban life and fulfillment of the citizens requirements. The citizens requirements include wide variety environmental, social, cultural, economical and physical aspects. All cities potential spaces and their natural values must be consider to sustainable fulfillment of the citizens requirements. One of the most important natural values in cities are rivers and their surrounded valley that always very interested for Authorities and urban planners to convert to urban green space.. Rehabilitate and planning of these rivers and rivers valleys is mainly done base on recreational development and sustainable development objectives. Therefore their suitable ecological conditionse is very important. Base on above consideration, the principle criteriaes for urban river valleys ecological evaluation base on sustainable landscape design, wereinvestigated. In this project, case research method by use of compound solution has been used. Results of this research reveals that landscape elements in Darabad river valley could be divided in four categories including 1-watery surfaces 2-topography 3-vegetation cover 4-artificial elements and the first priority in permanent ecological landscape restoring of this river valley is connected to preservation and restoring of the river and vegetation cover in the river floor and side gardens. Keywords: sustainable development, river valleys, urban environment, park