The Role of Flagship Developments in the Regeneration of Inner City Textures: The Case Study of Yazd City, Iran

Regeneration of historical and deteriorated areas of cities has been noted in recent urban planning literature worldwide. Inefficiency is a main problem in deteriorated urban areas where the possibility of updating and spontaneous changing has disappeared. Similar to many other countries, current process of extension of urban deteriorated area in Iran indicates that problems will be complicated, if we did not apply any precautionary measures, suitable policies, planning and ation plans. In this regard, one solution has been implementation of flagship developments. One of the main objectives of flagship developments is to achieve urban regeneration goals; an approach that is used as a comprehensive strategy for applying some positive changes in one place that have signs of deterioration. It considers quality improvement, with integrated goals of economic, social and physical topics. This strategy is used in order to improve a place that is in the process of decaying and deteriorating, but advocators of flagship development have unanimity in this subject, which one zone of urban wont achieve regeneration without such projects; Because of, flagship developments caused a series of reactions that will be finished to regeneration of urban fabric. On the other hand, it is not true that we hope to achieve development in the vast area of urban just by relying on this project because many projects in all around the world could not achieve their main goal that was regenerating a decaying fabric. Historical fabric of Yazd city is one of the important historical urban fabrics of Iran that have high historical value but in recent years, is encountered with decaying process. Accordingly, the present article is to collect indicators of urban mobility and development by studying the theoretical literature and reviewing practical experiences, to study the role of flagship developments in historic fabric of Yazd city. For having a comprehensive evaluation, had used 27 objective indicators in three branches: residential, activity and physical parameters, in the nine neighborhoods of the central districts of Yazd city. The research method is a combination of analytical techniques; On the one hand the world's leading texts on the urban regeneration and flagship development have studied. On the other hand the secondary data analysis of 850 city blocks in the statistical analysis software (SPSS 21) and geographic information systems (Arc GIS) was conducted. The findings of this study show that the main factors of evaluating the role of flagship development and such projects in regenerating the inner cities fabric, includes eight factors. These factors include: residential status, the physical condition of housing and residential environment, the activity situation, the economic situation, physical renewal, construction's mobility, governmental investment and general situation of neighborhood's fabric. Then by using TOPSIS as a multi-criteria decision making technique (MCDM) the results show that in the historic fabric of the city of Yazd, Gonbadesabz neighborhood has the best situation and Zoroastrians neighborhood has the most chaotic situation in relation to the combined indicators of mobility and development.