City Financing Management and New Urban Political Economy (Case Study: Mashhad Metropolis)

Increasing the urban population and expanding the level of expectations of the people, requires proper municipal services to citizens and, consequently, the expansion of financial resources and revenues of municipalities. Changing the traditional methods of financing and cutting government aid to the country's metropolitan municipalities based on the municipal self-sufficiency plan and then implementing the policy of economic adjustment and downsizing the government in the early 1370s, led municipalities to turn to surplus revenue It became congested. The municipality of Mashhad, with the annual presence of about 27 million pilgrims along with the population of 3.5 million in the city to provide services, needs to finance the monthly (current-construction) costs of several hundred billion cities, which is why, like other metropolises in Iran It depends on volatile revenues such as density sales and construction tolls. The purpose of this study is to investigate the financing system of Mashhad Municipality and the resulting new political economy. The research method is descriptive-analytical, the data of the financial and income system are prepared by the documentary method and the components of the resulting political economy are prepared by the Delphi-like method (interviews with experts and elites). Is. The results of the research show the financial reliance of Mashhad Municipality on unstable revenues due to construction and land tolls, especially the sale of excess construction density. Analysis of political economy This phenomenon indicates the creation of a new political economy based on granting rent permits to urban lands as the main income base of the country's municipalities, so that the sale of surplus density can be considered as the distribution of economic rents.