Urban Renewal Mega Projects and Residents’ Quality of Life: Evidence from Historical Religious Center of Mashhad Metropolis

Urban decay is the process by which a historical city center, or an old part of a city, falls into decrepitude and faces serious problems. Urban management, therefore, implements renewal mega projects with the goal of physical and functional revitalization, retrieval of socioeconomic capacities, and improving of quality of life of residents. Ignoring the complexities of these large-scale interventions in the old and historical urban fabrics may lead to undesirable consequences, including an additional decline of quality of life. Thus, the present paper aims to assess the impact of renewal mega projects on residents’ subjective quality of life, in the historical religious district of the holy city of Mashhad (Samen District). A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of impact assessment, including questionnaires, semi-structured personal interviews, and direct observation, is used in this paper. The results yield that the Samen Renewal Project has significantly reduced the resident’s subjective quality of life, due to its undesirable impacts on physical, socio-cultural, and economic environments.