Higher Education Centers’ Role in Promoting the Acculturation of Learning Urban Community: Sanabad and Jannat Neighborhoods, Mashhad

Mashhad metropolis with the consistent presence of millions of pilgrims and travelers is a great center of communication among different ethnic groups and cultures. This issue has created numerous economic and tourism opportunities and laid the ground for the interaction of incongruent cultural trends in this city. These incongruent cultural trends support opposite values at times and this contrast has been the cause of cultural challenges in Mashhad city. The current study has aimed at improving the cultural identity of this city by applying the learning city approach and emphasizing the role of higher education centers. Learning city with creating an atmosphere for diverse experiences entails all the social and cultural groups and provides the context for the activities that require involvement in order to ease the process of learning and acculturation for the citizens. In this study, after reviewing the theoretical literature, the components, criteria, and indicators of learning cities and the characteristics of learning and cultural environments were extracted from documentary sources; and since the criteria and the indicators are not equally important in the research, in order to use them in the next steps, the coefficient of the importance of them has been determined by the meta-synthesis matrix. In the next step, Sanabad and Jannat neighborhoods were selected as the case studies of this research. The selection criteria were the cultural and educational conditions of the neighborhoods and the number of immigrants moving to the neighborhoods in the last decade. Two neighborhoods have been divided into seven homogeneous areas based on the indicators of the access network, access to local services, socio-economic status, and the number of immigrants. Additionally, the number of questionnaires to measure the subjective indicators of research using Cochran's formula for the whole sample (150 people) and each homogeneous area is determined according to the ratio of its population to the total population. The required information for research indicators was collected from documentary sources and field survey and the reliability of the questionnaire questions was assessed using Cronbach's alpha tool. After collecting information, the research indicators were measured separately for population, spatial and social distribution indices in homogeneous areas and the obtained values were standardized for later use. The final score of each indicator in each area is used for: a) Identifying and ranking the areas in terms of infrastructure and cultural requirements to identify the stimulus area for cultural development and acculturation, and b) Identifying and proposing action priorities and the intervention for each of the homogeneous areas by using the cut-point method. The results of this study demonstrate that a district which is comprised of cultural infrastructures and requirements can act as a stimulant in cultural development and acculturation. Also, a spatial and institutional structure should be provided that facilitates the creation of urban communities with the possibility of different cultural trends through which higher education centers work in tandem with local communities to act as a unit for mediating, facilitating, and coordinating these communities.