A Critical Approach to the Interventions in Historical Urban Fabrics Focusing on City Competitiveness; Case Study: Central Area Surrounding the Holy Shrine, Mashhad, Iran

This paper reviews one of the main controversies in public policy, the concept of city competitiveness and how it responds to the issue of urban decline, accentuating the contribution of urban regeneration to competitiveness of cities through theoretical and case study review (Mashhad’s central historical urban fabrics). Following a review of four main urban regeneration themes within the conditions of competitiveness, a classification of the key considerations to each theme is presented in three comprehensive dimensions. Furthermore, urban interventions in historical contexts is the issue explored in Mashhad, a city envisioned to become the cultural-religious center within the Islamic world. The research seeks to explore whether the physical-spatial interventions in Mashhad’s central fabrics (considering the local existing potentials) have paved the way to the vision of a cultural-religious competitive city in the Islamic world or not. For this purpose, interventions through the city’s central historical urban fabrics within the last few decades are explored in an analytic-adaptive comparison with urban regeneration’s key considerations. It is finally revealed that urban decision-makers’ simplistic understanding towards urban competitiveness besides specialists’ negligence of the city’s local context as a competitive advantage and the conversion of pilgrimage culture to pilgrimage industry has led to a top-down bulldozing authoritative approach that not only sacrifices “socio-spatial values” for “commercial values” but also makes a distance between people and their living environment in the long run. It is highlighted that offering appropriate and possible regenerative strategies for the realization of suitable urban spaces should vary based upon given contextual capabilities and talents of each part of the city which may not be equally feasible in different cities.