A Street Landscape Reading , Mashhad’s Bala and Paein Khiaban as Entrances to Imam Reza’s Holy Shrine

Document Type : Original Research Article

Authors

1 Department of Architecture, Faculty of Art, & Urbanism, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad Branch, Najafabad, Iran.

2 Ph.D. in Architecture, Urban Landscape Subfield , Nazar Research Center, Tehran, Iran.

3 M.A. in Urban Planning, Department of Urban Planning, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, Azad University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran.

Abstract

As the first intervention on an urban scale,  Bala Khiaban (the street above the buried Imam Reza’s corpse) and Paein Khiaban (the street below the buried Imam Reza’s corpse) were built in Mashhad and they created an east-west axis to the center of the holy site. Since it has always played an important role in the spatial structure of cities and the imaginations of inhabitants throughout history, this axis has always been the focus of all administrations. However, interventions made in recent decades, particularly since the second Pahlavi to the present, have disrupted the urban texture, structures, districts, and systems that govern it, displacing locals as the true beneficiaries of this texture and causing several social, cultural, economic, and other issues.
The present paper is an inferential study that examines different resources from three historical eras to read the landscape of these two streets: Pre-Pahlavi (including historical documents and intellectual works), Pahlavi (historical and urban documents), and Post-Islamic Revolution (historical and urban documents as well as in-depth interviews). This research uses a landscape approach to investigate the significance of the streets in the spatial organization of Mashhad. 
According to the studies, the characteristics of the landscape in question served a single purpose in relation to each other in a harmonious manner prior to the urban interventions of the first comprehensive plan in the Pahlavi era. Despite the current period’s crisis and its repercussions on the street’s form and physical features, the public perception as the viewer is always so superior to the matter that the street landscape still exists to some extent and can be revived through some interventions in its main function. As a result of the research, it was discovered that the street in issue has typically been seen as a sublime axis associated with the concept of pilgrimage. 

Keywords

References

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MANZAR, the Scientific Journal of landscape
Volume 13, Issue 57
December 2021
Pages 64-77

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