Political Economic of Tourism and its Policy Implication for Urban Development in Mashhad

Tourism is mainly an urban matter. The main question of this study is about political economy.  How a city that has multiple types of tourism should be developed? We propose the three-level model of tourism-based urban development. The role of government is formulating the function of tourism destinations and making rules and laws for interventions. This is a mixed research. It is based on a systematic review and theories extracted from the field case study.  Optimal urban development of Mashhad regarding tourism from the perspective of political economy requires the identification of the function and political role of the city of Mashhad on a national scale, the identification of formal and informal interest groups, and collective agreement at the level of groups. Accordingly, using the VIKOR technique, the multifaceted tourism development programs in Mashhad were ranked considering the programs and groups involved. The results showed that in both cases, the development of health tourism and the expansion of recreational projects in Mashhad and its surroundings are the highest, so that health tourism is the first one regarding the criterion “groups involved with the program” having zero for VIKOR index, and the development and expansion of recreational projects in Mashhad and its surroundings, ranked the second one, having VIKOR index of 5.