visual hegemony in professional judgment: a qualitative delphi study on pedestrian street quallity

In many pedestrianization projects, particularly in iranian cities, a structural gap is persistently reproducedbetween the quality envisioned during the design process and the quality realized through users lived experiences.this article argues that such a gap cannot be adequately explained by technical deficiencies, implementation failures, orthe absence of design indicators alone, but must be theorized at a deeper level, within the epistemological logic ofprofessional judgment through which spatial quality is identified, prioritized, and legitimized. adopting a qualitativeexploratory–explanatory research design, the study examines how urban design experts judge pedestrian street qualityand which implicit evaluative patterns structure these judgments. to this end, a three-round qualitative delphi methodwas conducted with fourteen architecture and urban design experts, intentionally designed not to achieve consensus butto elicit tacit, taken-for-granted assumptions underlying professional judgment. data were analyzed using thematicanalysis and directed content analysis to trace the stabilization of dominant judgment patterns across delphi rounds. thefindings reveal that prevailing professional judgment, shaped by academic training and dominant design discourses, ischaracterized by a professional gaze structured through visual hegemony, whereby spatial quality is largely reducedto physical-formal and visually oriented criteria. this evaluative logic stands in fundamental tension with users'experience of space as embodied, multisensory, and temporally situated. rather than offering empirical generalizations,this article advances a theoretically transferable interpretation of the quality gap, reframing it as a cognitive andepistemological tension embedded within professional judgment, with important implications for urban design evaluationand professional educationo.