Identifying Valuable Urban Areas in Mashhad

Many urban specialists in the information and globalization era are concerned with conservation of urban values and transforming them into urban identities. Still denying the past is implied in many proposed urban development plans. They seek urban values merely in the physical fabric of the city not in other things. Urban values and identities play a crucially important role in enforcement and promotion of local and national cultural heritage in the globalization period. Many of these urban values in Mashhad face destruction as a result of renovation activities. This research has two purposes. The first purpose is to explain the meaning, hierarchy and significance of values in forming urban identity by showing some examples from other countries (photos); and the second purpose is to identify valuable urban areas in Mashhad. To achieve this purpose a stratified sampling survey was conducted including 412 filled questionnaires from three groups (tourists: 104; peoples, business: 199 peoples and other civilian: 109). The results show that there are 53 valuable urban areas in three dispersed patterns including: axle or linear pattern (12), complex pattern (19) and point pattern (22). Also valuable areas are divided into eight sub-groups and were ranked according to religious, touristic, business and historical indices. Locations such as the Holy Shrine from religious aspect, Torqabe from touristic aspect, Reza Bazaar from business aspect Ferdowsi tomb from historical aspect were identified as the most valuable areas in the city. Finally the relationship between attitudes of different sub-groups about priority of valuable areas was investigated using ANOVA. The results show that there is a significant deference between attitudes of three sub-groups on eight valuable areas. However, these sub-groups do have some common valuable features including touristic and religious values. The priority of these features must be taken into consideration in the future activities. Also there are other valuable areas in Mashhad which are ignored and need to be investigated using others methods in further research projects.