Redevelopment of Endowed Infill in the City of Mashhad

Amongst the essential challenges of urban planning is the shortage of land for developing and supplying the urban regions’ needs, especially in large cities like Mashhad. Under the land shortage conditions, the development of the underdeveloped lands should be sought in line with taking advantage of all the internal urban competencies within the framework of infill development. Endowed urban lands are amongst the underdeveloped lands and spaces. Mashhad is amongst the cities wherein the endowed ownership plays an important role in urban development and management. Particularly, District 6 of Mashhad’s municipality about 80% of the lands of which are under-endowed ownership by Astan-e-Quds-e-Razavi and faces a shortage of land, inefficiency, and lack of dynamicity in its internal textures. The shortage of land for development and supply of the urban regions’ needs, especially in large cities like Mashhad, are amongst the essential challenges of urban planning. Under such circumstances, the development of underdeveloped lands should be sought for taking advantage of all the internal capabilities of the city within the framework of infill development. In this article, the possibility of redeveloping the endowed properties in this region within the format of infill capacity assessment has been investigated. In order to accomplish this goal, the infill capacity assessment indices of endowed lands were identified and investigated for District Six and use was made of geographical information system (GIS) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for determining their overlaps and prioritizing the development-prone land parcels . The results indicated that the scale “familiarity with the endowment requirements”, with a significance coefficient of 0.154, is the most important factor and the scale “upstream criteria”, with a significance coefficient of 0.021, is the weakest factor for assessing the capacity of endowed urban lands redevelopment.