The role of regionalism in improvement of Mashhad management with an emphasis on the efficiency of Mashhad municipality districts

Development of urbanization and rise of cities and urbanism during the last decade have added new dimensions to urban issues and have led to increasing importance of monitoring, conduction of urban development and organization of towns and their surrounding regions. In the meantime, the procedures of favorable life management play the most important role in improvement of human habitats and sustainable urban development, since the regulatory factors in urban plans and procedures of dealing with urban problems stem from the efficiency of urban management. One of the new ways of management is decentralized urban management which contributes to realization of desired goals of urban administration through division of tasks and responsibilities. Furthermore, unified and integrated management of big cities like Mashhad is not possible and requires its division into small units. Provision of better and more efficient services to the citizens requires urban divisions at different levels, so that these services may be presented and managed more evenly in all parts of the city, in accordance with their hierarchy. Meanwhile, the regionalism policy that has been implemented in Mashhad Municipality since 1386 has been an attempt to achieve this end by dividing the 13 municipality districts into 42 regions. This study is an attempt to evaluate the success of this policy and the extent of success in execution of the decentralized management. For this purpose, the efficiency and performance of different regions in Mashhad was evaluated using the DEA method and constant returns of scale and variable returns of scale methods. The results of this study suggest that so far, regionalism has failed to achieve decentralized management completely, and some Mashahd municipality districts could not fall within the efficiency frontiers, while the policy has led to increasing complexity (geographic and vertical) in the structural dimensions of the municipality.