Spatial analysis of social happiness in Mashhad

Based on the definition of social happiness advocated by veenhoven, it can be posited that he considers happiness as the type of behavior that leads to desirable quality of life. The purpose of this paper is to define and analyze social happiness at urban areas. First of all, it should be noted that one who drives happiness by spreading joy through energetic behaviors and expressions, charm, humors and passions in friendly and intimate circles is considered as belonging to the warm-type happiness promotion category. Further, one who conveys a good sense to others belongs to the cold-type happiness promotion category. After interviewing the happiness promoters in this study, we came across people who were the opposite of the former group. We labeled them as happiness reception, who absorbed joy and happiness in the intimate circles. Based on this classification, it should be stated that as far as ​​social vitality in cities is concerned, the social happiness variable and its components play a significant role in the life of individuals and urban planning. Based on this process, in the present paper a mixed research methods was used. The first step involved a qualitative study (collective case study). The second step was a quantitative analysis (survey) and the last step was the point interpolation. Based on these three steps, a random and spatial-regional based sampling was conducted. The research area was the city of Mashhad and its districts during the second half of 2018. The data collection instrument was a semi-structured interview, an interview-based questionnaire, and a spatial distribution mapping of the findings on the urban areas. The results showed that the social vitality of citizens was at the average level. Meanwhile, districts (1-2-4-5) were lower than average; district 9 was at the average level and districts (3-6-7-8-10-11-12 and Samen area) were higher than average. In terms of the social happiness, districts 10-11-12 had the highest and districts 1-4-5 had the lowest social vitality. In the urban areas of Mashhad, districts 10 and 5 had the highest and lowest social vitality among the 13 urban districts of the city, respectively.