Green linkage spaces: new urban design strategies for urban spaces in Mashhad City (Iran) due to cultural landscape approaches

The importance of heritage sites, heritage objects and even all relics fundamentally comes from their identities which have been raised their values through the time. Identity by definition is the representative quality of a phenomenon that clearly describes the corresponding inner character. Cities as physical creation results of the human civilization have lots of different factors that altogether manifest their identities. In accordance, buildings, spaces and people take the main roles in representing the story of the urban identities. Historical cities all around the word have their own sufficient footprints to declare the identity of those places both for citizens and other visitors. Unfortunately, by appearing of the modernization era, it seems that this issue has been changed on the face of the contemporary cities. Iranian cities are significant examples which had meaningful transformations from traditional to the modern structures in recent century. This dissertation mainly concerns about presentation and analysis of the problem of losing identity in urban spaces of Iranian contemporary cities and possibly providing an applicable solution for this issue. Dealing to mentioned goal, this research commences with considering the quality of identity in Iranian urban spaces. We focus on the variations of identity in Iranian cities from traditional to contemporary era. The comparison of mentioned paradigms clearly shows the appearance of a frustrating death of the identity after modernization era in contemporary Iranian urban spaces. “Cultural landscape” approach is the selected theoretical notion in order to solve this problem. The cultural landscape approach could provide a sufficient opportunity for making the precise definition of the relations between human and his environment by considering the emotional, historical and cultural aspects of the places. Proper description of aforesaid relations altogether creates the characteristic values of the identity of places. These theoretical studies conclude by presenting a “matrix of analysis” for further uses in the process of urban design. Final characteristics of the matrix of analysis are mainly defined according to the features extracted from fundamental theories of cultural landscape categorized in material, immaterial and link classes in relation with the main important features of the identity comprising physical features, functions and meanings. Our conclusive achievements are presented by using the “matrix of analysis” for a practical real case study in Mashhad city, Iran. The conceptual framework implemented for transforming an abandoned canal to the format of new generation urban spaces by implementing the strategies of “green linkage spaces”. This study seems to be a valuable starting point for advantaging from the abilities of the “cultural landscape” approaches in increasing the quality of identity in contemporary urban spaces and in particular for the revival of identity in urban spaces of Iranian cities.