Urban landscape services planning in an urban river-valley corridor system case study: Tehran’s Farahzad River-valley landscape system

Undesirable changes in structural-functional relation of urban landscape structures’ ecological processes lead to energy-information fluxes of support systems being disrupted. By considering the existing challenges in the planning of the Farahzad River-valley Corridor System (FRCS), we studied the state of energy-information fluxes of FRCS within the framework of Urban Landscape Services Network (ULSN) for improving and simplifying future decision-making processes. To do this, ULSN was classified into a network of living orders in three organizational levels: Physical-Biological, Geographical-Anthropological and Ecological-Sociological, as a new paradigmatic approach in which function and position of ULSN are illustrated through energy-information fluxes of a networked urban landscape attributes (vertical, horizontal and global). The energy-information fluxes in FRCS were surveyed through the dynamics of heterogeneity systems in landscape structural components (connectivity-isolation dynamics) and then interpreted at the networked levels of living orders. Based on our findings, inefficient structural changes in FRCS leads to undesired energy-information fluxes, which in turn caused changes in the river-valley’s balanced natural, connected environmental, and integrated landscape structures. Currently, FRCS serves as a usual urban park in which many potentials of energy-information fluxes, or ULSN, have been overlooked in its urban planning. Such classification system, based on the energy-information fluxes within organizational levels and through the heterogeneity of the landscape, would help landscape planners to have a better understanding of the functions and values of FRCS and similar landscape services in order to achieve an integrated urban landscape management.