Urban development plans, as one of the principal pillars of Iran’s urban planning system, guide the future development of cities over periods exceeding a decade through two key instruments: land-use maps and planning regulations. However, despite more than three decades of research demonstrating that the realization of proposed land uses has remained partial and imbalanced, this planning pattern has persisted. This applied study employs a qualitative approach and a descriptive method to address, in two stages, why this pattern has persisted and what mechanisms have stabilized it. In the first stage, the realization rates of proposed land uses, along with the causes of their non-realization, were extracted from selected previous studies. These causes were subsequently categorized through qualitative content analysis within the framework of path dependence theory. The findings indicate that these causes exhibit substantial overlap regardless of time and location. While the causes identified in earlier periods were predominantly technical in nature, those identified in more recent periods can be categorized within technical, institutional, and discursive dimensions. In the second stage, the formation of the phenomenon of land-use lock-in and path dependence in land-use planning in Iran was identified and explained through system-, learning-, procedural-, behavioral-, and motivation-based mechanisms. Finally, two strategies are proposed for breaking the existing path: first, transferring the commissioning authority from the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development to municipalities; and second, shifting the consequences of land-use allocation on privately owned land from individual ownership to the collective domain.