Introduction: Lefebvre's right to the city is a radical reconceptualization of goals, definition and content of political communities and the concept of participation plays a great role in it. This project has used Arnestein ladder of participation as a conceptual construct to evaluate different levels of citizen participation, as well as the relation between participation and Lefebvre's idea of the right to the city.

Method: This study has been conducted by survey method using multistage cluster sampling on 879 citizens of 22 municipalities of the city of Tehran.

Findings: Citizen Participation in urban design is very low and at the tokenism level while there are no gender differences in the levels of participation.

Debate: Implementing Lefebvre’s concept of right to city in this study indicates that in designing urban spaces, capital and class are considered prominent factors by urban authorities while public participation and gender are neglected. The hegemonic discourse of capital is prevalent in the urban space planning. This situation is rooted in the institutional mechanisms and structures thus any change to the current trends, requires alterations in structures of citizen participation.

Introduction: Informal settlements are emanation of poverty which originated from housing policy incompetence along with inattention to requirements of large part of urban low income people. Relying on some factors like geographical location, utility of place, social attributes of occupant groups, services and facilities level, future programs, and level of hope for the future, these settlements has different residential value and subsequently different development direction ,in some cases, these settlements significantly has been improved.

method: This research, through cross-sectional method and by utilizing of field information, in two times with 8-year interval, analogically has studied vicissitude of housing and condition of life of one of the largest informal settlements of Kermanshah city. Dowlatabad settlement in which situated in the west of the city, and has 95 thousands inhabitant, is the statistical population of the research.

Findings: finds of this research indicates that various effective index on the poor subsistence, such as demographic index, occupation and insurance, accessibility, housing, facilities, access to formal funds for housing and vocation securance , has been improved.in most of cases, this trend has been tangible and significant. However, due to merger of settlement in city and expansion of urban culture in there, some of the indicators that deal with social interactions, social relationships, and social capital, have decreased.

Discussion: the trend of evolution and improvement of Dowlatabad- as one of the most principal informal settlements- in housing, services and facilities is significant. The trend of condition improvement of Dowlatabad is due to economic and social changes that somewhat has been able to accelerate the trend of improvement of formal Upgrading programs, especially relating to physical upgrading. Stability of unemployment rate indicates durability of neighborhood unemployment problem and decrease of amount of social interaction and relationships shows that neighborhood has entered to phase of keeping out from prior rural traditional structure. This survey demonstrates that problems of Dowlatabad have transformed from physical issue to social issue and its current concerns and needs have local community development.

Assessment of Upgrade Quality of Life in Informal Settlements in the Past Decade

(Case study: Dowlatabad, Kermanshah)