Identifying the critical success factors for urban renovation projects; lessons learned from Tehran residential renovation projects

The dramatic extent of worn-out tissue in the city of Tehran, which has a high population density and a constant threat of earthquakes, makes it important to understand the issues relating to the necessity of changes in the attitudes of renovation projects management and the adoption of effective strategies. Despite the significance of this fact, very few studies have focused on identifying the key success factors for renovation projects so far. Although extensive research has been conducted on effective factors on the success of the projects, most of these studies have examined the key success factors in general and different kinds of projects and their special features were ignored. Therefore, this study is an attempt to identify these factors and their ranking according to their importance. After reviewing the specialized literature and content analysis of documents related to the past residential renovation projects, 15 key success factors were identified in Tehran. Then opinions of 75 experts and urban managers were collected through a questionnaire. The binomial test proved that 2 factors out of 15 were unimportant and consequently the ranking was performed using the other 13. Then the remaining 13 factors were ranked. Designing appropriate methods for financing, choosing the most effective and appropriate intervention techniques and analysis and learning from the experiences of the past projects were identified as the most important factors, respectively. Also, by using exploratory factor analysis, we could classify factors into four groups: enabler, facilitator, prerequisites and requirements.