Dimensions and Indicators of the Happy City in Mashhad’s Neighborhoods (Case Studies: Tabarsee Fareq Altahsilan Neighborhoods)

Concern for happiness and its strategic dimensions plays a key role in provision of desirable environment quality in urban neighborhoods, ignorance of which is an issue with which cities, metropolises such as Mashhad, Iran in particular, are faced as a requirement for man to achieve sustainable urban life. In recent decades, new and old developments have been made in Mashhad, and neighborhoods have been created that do not meet the desired level of quality, and suffer many problems such as lack of public areas, insecurity, lack of visual beauty, lack of local facilities, poor sense of belonging, environmental pollution, and inappropriate conditions for neighborhood relations. This has actually lowered the level of happiness and vitality as a missing, neglected factor in the citizens’ lives, highlighting the need for proper, happy environmental design. Among the newly-developed neighborhoods is the Fareghottahsilan neighborhood, and Tabarsi is one that has been developed long ago. The purpose of this study was to assess the dimensions and indicators of happiness in old and new areas of Mashhad with different characteristics, to identify the dimensions and indicators of a happy city to solve the problems in urban neighborhoods fundamentally and efficiently towards achievement of greater sustainability in local communities. The present applied-developmental, quantitative, descriptive-analytical research was based on library studies. 320 citizens were randomly selected from among the residents of the Tabarsi and Fareghottahsilan neighborhoods to fill out the questionnaires. Data analysis was made in SPSS using statistical tests including Friedman, Mann-Whitney, Spearman, Chi-square and Cramér’s coefficient. According to the results of the analysis, it was only the physical dimension among those of happiness that exhibited relatively favorable conditions only in the Fareghottahsilan neighborhood (3.22), and both neighborhoods had unfavorable conditions in the other dimensions. Moreover, a significant difference was found between the indicators of happiness in the old and new neighborhoods. Another finding was that the average rate of happiness in the Fareghottahsilan neighborhood (167.90) was higher than that in Tabarsi (135.45), which demonstrated that the residents of the new neighborhood were happier than those of the old neighborhood, but the difference between the two in terms of happiness was not big. Happiness was positively related to income, residence ownership, ethnicity, employment, marital status, and family size, and it was negatively related to age. Finally, the greatest correlations with happiness and vitality were observed for job security in both neighborhoods from an economic perspective, level of safety and quality of lighting in the old neighborhood and access to green spaces and quality of water spaces in the new neighborhood from a physical perspective, level of security in the old neighborhood and participation in local celebrations and participation in solving the problems in the new neighborhood from a social perspective.