The government-oriented approach to urban regeneration and dependent gentrification: performance analysis of key stakeholders in the renovation of the fabric surrounding the Holy Shrine in Mashhad

Gentrification is defined as the promotion of degraded or old assets of the middle or high class of the society. This process operates in a powerful manner within the urban geography of capitalism and represents the conflict between various urban stakeholder groups. The purpose of this study was to provide an analysis of the conditions and processes governing the gentrification process in one of its controversial examples in Iran, i.e. the old fabric surrounding the Holy Shrine in Mashhad. Based on this, a series of deep interviews with 26 participants who were knowledgeable in this issue was conducted. Through grounded theory, the data (interviews) were analyzed. The factors underlying the gentrification process of the decayed urban fabric surrounding the Shrine were explored as follows : Underlying conditions such as the increasing commodification of the urban atmosphere, arbitrary governmental interventions in housing...; Causative conditions such as pseudo-governmental monopoly in the process of privatization, the lack of public funding and the constraints on governments, ...; interventional conditions such as the increasing complexity of metropolitan entrepreneurship; the pattern of attracting and retaining foreign investment,...; Strategic conditions, including the violation of free marketing rules by governmental and pseudo-governmental stakeholders, gaining profit through supplying and demanding rents..., and the consequences of gentrification such as the rejection of early urban stakeholders and the undermining of the socio-economic foundations of democratic structures. To sum up, the gentrification process of the old fabric of the Razavi Shrine is a kind of "government-oriented approach to urban regeneration with a dependent gentrification nature"