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.