An Evaluation of Application of Infill Development to Urban Distressed areas: A Case Study of Distressed Areas of Mashhad

The necessity of finding a congruent solution to confront the indiscriminate spread of cities on the one hand, and changing the attitude toward the intervention method in the old and dysfunctional textures, on the other hand, have led to the evolution of theoretical frameworks of these methods of intervention in urban textures. The aim of this method is making the most of the under-development urban lands as well as maintaining the highest possible amount of valuable non-urban lands. Infill development is a kind of brownfield redevelopment with a special focus on the conditions and internal potentials of the target area. Redevelopment capacities could, in their simple and superficial form, lead to using vacant lands existing in the area ,and in a more sophisticated form, to taking into consideration redevelopment potentials and capacities, more thoroughly.This is an applied descriptive-analytic study aimed at coming up with a pattern for less- used buildings and brownfield redevelopment of the urban distressed areas of Mashhad metropolis. Data was analyzed using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method.To assess infill development potentials of the worn-out texture, 9 related indices of the GIS environment were used and it was revealed that the buildings’ age sub-criteria with a score of 0.3127 and the buildings’ quality with a score of 0.2356 have the highest scores and access to recreation centers sub-criteria with a score of 0.0177 and construction materials of the buildings sub-criteria with a score of 0.0221 have the lowest scores. The results showed that %13 of the texture possess a very high development capacity and %42 possess a high development capacity.

Keywords:

Distressed areas , Infill Development , Mashhad Metropolis , AHP