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The significance of vision and visioning in marking the economic, social and physical
destiny of cities and communities can not be overstated and that is why it has appropriately been labeled as the Heart of strategic planning and design process. A review on the related lit¬erature reveals that while several varied vision¬ing models are readily available, nevertheless there is a significant gap in our knowledge as far as the systematic formulation of the "vision statement" is concerned.
This article aims to present a conceptual frame¬work to facilitate the systematic development of city/ community vision statements, and to base the process on sound theoretical underpinnings depicting a comprehensive and multifaceted picture of the city/ community as it would look
like in a relatively distant future. In so doing, first a review on the concept of city/ community vision has been carried out; next examining two general models of visioning, i.e. C.D.S Model and Oregon Model, the place of " Vision Statement Formulation" within the overall pro¬cess of visioning activity has been underlined; then a multitude of exemplar vision statements excerpted from several statutory planning doc¬uments has been analyzed; and finally a con¬ceptual framework for the systematic formula¬tion of vision statement has been proposed and tested.
The findings of the study indicate that in pursuit of sound theoretical foundations for vision state¬ment formulation process environmental cogni¬tion theories such as those of Lynch's City
Image (1960) and Go ledge's Anchor-point Hypothesis (1978) could be instrumental. Subsequently drawing on this body of literature, a conceptual framework for the systematic for¬mulation of vision statement has been estab¬lished and through an experimental application or the suggested framework in the Tehran's
CBD Regeneration Plan its validity has been tested and reported.