A Qualitative Assessment of the Peripheral Texture Development of a Holy Site (Case study: Imam Reza Street)

Since old times, religious places have played a key role in the development and configuration of cities. However, the rapid development of cities, especially big cities, has led to widespread structural, operational, and functional developments. These developments have turned the public urban arenas, once the scene of the most pleasurable public memories and large-scale events and the most important places for citizens’ gatherings, into unfamiliar, spiritless, and harsh environments, which have eliminated the human power of discovery and involvement with space. Imam Reza’s religious axis [street], which acts as the entrance into the holy site, is considered an active urban axis located in the traditional texture of the city. This axis, characterized by spatial placeness values, has defined the quality of accessibility to this central site since the Pahlavi era. In the meantime, structural developments, together with the rifts in the historical past of the street, have disrupted the spatial identity of the axis. This article aims to explain the factors affecting the discontinuity of the place identity and investigate the components that need to be redefined in space to create placeness in the Imam Reza axis. The research used a descriptive-analytical method based on documents, library sources, and field observations. The findings revealed that structural continuity in the Imam Reza axis preserves identity characteristics, prevents the historical disruption of the axis with its past, and can also resolve communication-functional problems. That said, the continuity of the axis’s placeness requires these characteristics, and the loss of each undermines placeness and the religious landscape of the axis as a whole.