Application of Grounded Theory in The Emergence of an Urban Theory: Regeneration of the Central Part of Mashhad

The knowledge of urban planning relies on the precise understanding of the relationship between the human and the environment seeking to improve the quality of human life and built environment. Thus, this knowledge requires a theoretical foundation through which a better understanding of urban issues can be developed, and a suitable solution can be proposed. Therefore, production and explanations of theories using accurate and suitable methods are imperative and increase the richness of the urban planning knowledge. Meanwhile, the lack of appropriate theorizing methods in urban planning, the experts not believing in them, the existence of inconsistent theories built on quantitative methods with no regard for the social and environmental relations, and negligence of users towards the understanding and interpretation of the space highlights the importance of using the ground-based methodology to develop urban theories. Nowadays, how the old urban fabrics are to be dealt with has become one of the significant challenges of urban planning since the environment quality, and ecological balance have declined in these environments. Thus,a proper intervention aimed at improving the quality of urban life and gaining the satisfaction of its residents and users has become an inevitable necessity. Renovations projects are carried out in worn-out urban fabrics aiming to increase the quality of the urban environment; however, these projects have not achieved much success realizing their goals, have brought about new challenges for these fabrics, and have led to the dissatisfaction of a wide range of users and residents. The central urban fabric of Mashhad is one of the old regions of the town, which is dealing with the phenomena of being worn out due to the continuous residence. Serious renovations started in this fabric in the 1990s and have continued since. The present study seeks to discover how an urban recreation framework based on a critical study of the implemented renovation process emphasizes grounded research methodology. Thus, the study seeks to answer how the grounded methodology can be used to achieve a recreation framework tailored to the central region of the religious city of Mashhad. To understand the process of renovation in this fabric, one must question the approach of people and various groups towards the renovation of Mashhad central region. Grounded research seeks the three goals of exploration, description, and understanding the subject. The most important issue discussed recreation and renovation strategies is their risk of failure. Given that recreation policies engage various stakeholders, dispute and incompatibility between them over their interests are among the challenges these strategies have always faced, resulting in their failure and ineffectiveness. Thus, the institutional approach emphasizes the interaction between local stakeholders and upstream levels and demands the participation of organizations and groups to reduce the risk of plans’ failure. The lukewarm acceptance of some people towards the marginal and worn-out urban fabric renovation projects confirms this claim. Understanding the recreation framework in the central region of Mashhad is complex and challenging due to the holy shrine of Imam Reza (AS), the presence of pilgrims, residents, businesses, and the renovation procedures, which make any pre-conceived model or specific hypothesis of the influential variable over-simplistic. This is why this subject had better be studied in its specific context and ground-based on the opinions of stakeholders and methodological data collection. Grounded theory is a research strategy proposed by two American sociologists, Glaser and Strauss, which defines how the data that has been collected methodically throughout a social study is to be used. The application of this method to predict, describe, and explain has attracted the attention of scholars since its emergence. This method has an inductive approach to the development of theory and extracts theories from the heart of research through establishing an ongoing persistent relationship between data collection and analysis. The data must reflect the meanings and perceptions of people engaged in the modeled phenomena, and the results must be presented as an interconnected set of concepts rather than a simple list of several themes. Thus, the stakeholders’ cognitive assessment of the intervention in urban fabrics impacts their level of participation and the plans’ level of realization. The grounded theory can discover people’s mentalities regarding these plans through making connections with them, determining the positive and negative features of each project based on their perception, and thus improving the feasibility of the plans through eliminating the weaknesses and highlighting the strengths. The process starts with collecting data and coding them openly.The data are then classified into separate categories and are revaluated to reveal the internal connections between them, summarized into more comprehensive categories at higher levels through several analytical stages, and will make up the main category, i.e., the grounded theory- in the end. The detailed steps of the process include data collection, presenting the research questions, sampling, analysis, and evaluation of the processes and results, which will be elaborated on in the following. Results of the study indicated that the grounded theory helps understand the various and deeper layers impacting physical, social, etc. changes and various techniques must be sued for the development of theory. It was also revealed that urban management must pay attention to the mental, objective, and functional spaces in the six aspects of economic, management, socio-cultural, functional, ecological, and physical should it intend to intervene in the urban fabric of Islamic cities.