Shiraz Master Plan
Core idea
Heritage core + ring roads
Why it matters
Historic city modernization
Description
A comprehensive master plan for Shiraz approved around 2012, prepared within Iran's hierarchical master-planning system for the municipality. The plan combines protection and management of the historic core, with its bazaar, shrines and garden heritage, with modern infrastructure moves including ring roads and arterial improvements to handle metropolitan growth. It follows the Iranian tradition of periodic comprehensive plans that set land use, density and road networks for major cities.
Significance
The Shiraz plan is representative of how Iranian master planning negotiates between heritage cities and car-oriented modernisation, a tension running through the country's planning since the mid-twentieth century. It contributes to debates on whether ring roads and clearances protect or erode historic fabric, in a city whose gardens and monuments are of national and international importance.
What shaped it
- Genius Loci (Norberg-Schulz) (1979)
Sources
- https://www.isocarp.net/data/case_studies/730.pdf
- https://www.academia.edu/6924942/A_Case_Study_of_Shiraz_City_in_Iran