Prioritizing Tourist Attractions in Historically Regenerated Areas (Case Study: Zandieh Historical Complex in Shiraz)

Recognizing tourist attractions and capabilities with the aim of urban development and promotion of the presence of tourists is of high importance. Tourism-led urban regeneration can be considered as the main urban regeneration approach in the last two decades. Tourism in a strategic position and with the goal of achieving an economic and booming mechanism that can include urban development goals and draw a different face for the city. Tourism-led urban regeneration, by developing basic concepts such as innovative economic issues, finds that the inner context and central core of the cities can confidently benefit from the effects of urban tourism and its beneficial features in the regeneration process. This approach respects the traditional framework and adds new structures to these combinations in accordance with those frameworks. In this way, it represents a content and function with a superstructure of cultural and social issues, and an infrastructure of a fully economic and productive mechanism. Such a perspective brings about a kind of convergence in the purpose and means of urban regeneration. The lack of sufficient research in this regard has caused Iran not to have appropriate design and organization, in spite of the existence of indoor historical sites and urban tourist attractions. As noted earlier, there is little research on tourism-led urban regeneration in Iran. In addition, the frameworks proposed for studying urban tourism have more considered the concepts and methodology of urban tourism. In this way, it is necessary to carry out applied research to study urban tourism in order to explore the principles and criteria for urban regeneration. This research tries to fill this gap and focus on urban tourism by defining the different dimensions of urban regeneration as well as providing a set of principles and criteria appropriate for the urban space and testing them in Zandieh historical complex in Shiraz. The purpose of this research is to identify the tourist attractions in historically regenerated areas. First, a content analysis has been conducted to identify the principles of tourism-based regeneration, and the literature has been reviewed for various definitions, views and theories provided by scholars. Second, using the field method, tourism-led urban regeneration criteria have been verified through urban tourists’ questionnaire in Zandieh regenerated historical complex in Shiraz. The statistical population of the urban tourists in Shiraz city was 4,720,000 people in 1394. Using the Cochran formula, it is found that the sample size included 384/124 people. Therefore, the population of tourists was estimated to be 385 people. In order to increase the accuracy and reduce the functional error, 400 questionnaires were distributed among the tourists. It should be noted that the sampling method in this study was cluster sampling. The urban tourists’ questionnaire was analyzed using SPSS software and Friedman test. The findings revealed that the historical and memorable capabilities are at the first place and the cultural, recreational and environmental capabilities are at the second to fourth place of the prioritizing list. This is a good guide for tourism-led urban regeneration planning in Zandieh historical complex.