Prioritizing the Effective Urban Space Qualities in Providing Investors Expectations, Using Delphi Technique. Case study: Central District of Mashhad City

Background and Amis: The city-wide competition economy is causing the municipality to seek to attract private sector investment. But investors are looking for economic assurance for investment, and urban space qualities are important to them. Meanwhile, urban designers have different justifications for their economic impact in the process of providing qualities of urban space. The absence of categorized classifications of urban space qualities, based on its impact on economic metrics to direct urban space design methods, has created a challenge to attract investors’ attention. Therefore, urban designers should fulfill the economic justification and local identity with utilizing quality classification. The purpose of this paper is to prioritize the qualities of urban space that is effective in providing expectations of investors based on the views of urban designers. By prioritizing urban designers in addition to providing effective qualities, they can provide economic justification for investment. Since central district of Mashhad city has transnational tourism and economic attractiveness for private sectors, it has been selected as a case study for this paper.  Delphi technique has been used to prioritize urban space qualities and to build a consensus between urban designers.  Methodology: In order to study this research, 12 effective qualities in urban space design were selected. Then, the degree of importance of urban space quality were calculated. Conclusion: The findings represent a high score for functional dimensional quality. Finally, the results show that the first-class qualities provide the most investor expectations.