Over the past few decades, the urban fabric surrounding the Holy Shrine of Imam Reza (AS) in Mashhad has undergone extensive redevelopment. These transformations have largely prioritised infrastructural capacity, accessibility, and crowd management in response to the growing scale of pilgrimage. While such measures have improved logistical performance and service provision, they have also contributed to a progressive weakening of the experiential and meaning-laden dimensions of pilgrimage. Large-scale demolition, functional zoning, traffic-oriented design, and commercially driven development have increasingly disrupted the relational continuity between human presence, spatial structure, and the sacred meanings historically embedded in the pilgrimage environment. As a result, many of the spaces surrounding the shrine now operate primarily as corridors of movement rather than as places of gradual approach, bodily attunement, and spiritual preparation.
Within culture-oriented, place-based approaches to urban regeneration, this research proposes a meaning-based framework for regenerating the spaces and places surrounding the shrine, grounded in the theoretical concept of the Field of Appresentation. Drawing on phenomenological traditions, appresentation is understood as the process through which absent meanings—such as memory, belief, and transcendence—are made experientially present through bodily perception, spatial cues, and cultural practices. From this perspective, sacred urban space is not a passive container of symbols, but an active field in which meaning is continuously constituted through the interplay of perception, action, memory, and belief. Accordingly, the erosion of pilgrimage experience cannot be addressed through formal or aesthetic interventions alone, but requires reconfiguring the appresentational conditions that allow sacred meaning to emerge and be sustained in lived experience.
Methodologically, the study adopts a mixed qualitative–quantitative design with a phenomenological and context-sensitive orientation. The objective is not statistical generalisation, but an in-depth, situated understanding of how meaning is appresented along pilgrimage routes leading to the shrine. Data were collected through document analysis, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, sensory–spatial mapping, and GIS-supported analysis. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with pilgrims, shrine servants, long-term residents, and local shopkeepers, selected through purposive sampling to capture diverse experiential positions within the pilgrimage field. In parallel, nine key nodes along the main pilgrimage routes—primarily thresholds, pauses, and ritual movement junctions—were identified as focal points for detailed field investigation.
The analytical framework organises data around four interrelated experiential domains that structure the Field of Appresentation: environment, ritual, memory, and belief. The environmental domain addresses multi-sensory qualities such as light, sound, materiality, crowd density, and microclimate. The ritual domain examines embodied practices of movement, pause, prayer, and collective synchronisation. The memory domain explores personal and collective recollections, including perceptions of historical continuity, loss, and attachment to place. The belief domain focuses on subjective experiences of sacred presence, spiritual proximity, and moments of intensified or diminished transcendence. Through triangulation of interview narratives, observational records, video-based behavioural analysis, and spatial data, the study constructs a layered reading of how these four domains interact to present meaning within the pilgrimage environment.
The findings indicate that the contemporary crisis of the shrine’s surrounding spaces can be understood through four interrelated forms of rupture: sensory rupture, manifested in overstimulation, noise, and loss of atmospheric calm; performative rupture, reflected in the disruption of ritual rhythms by traffic flows and commercial pressures; temporal rupture, marked by the erasure of historical layers and weakening of continuity between past and present pilgrimage practices; and inner rupture, characterised by a reduced capacity for introspection, spiritual focus, and felt sacred presence. Crucially, the analysis demonstrates that interventions limited to physical form or infrastructural efficiency are insufficient to repair these ruptures, as they fail to engage the deeper appresentational mechanisms through which meaning is constituted.
In response, the Field of Appresentation model reframes the shrine’s surroundings as a multi-layered experiential field in which meaning emerges through reciprocal activation. Bodily perception appresents absent sacred referents; ritual practices synchronise individual and collective presence; memory anchors experience within a temporal continuum; and belief modulates the intensity and orientation of perception. Meaning-based urban regeneration, in this sense, is defined not as the restoration of a fixed historical image, but as the recalibration of appresentational conditions that enable these processes to operate coherently in contemporary contexts.
On this basis, the study translates the four experiential domains into a set of design-oriented principles applicable to urban regeneration and architectural intervention. These include reinforcing ritual continuity along pilgrimage routes, enhancing the legibility of collective memory through spatial and material cues, moderating sensory conditions within threshold spaces to support bodily and emotional attunement, and promoting forms of spatial justice that balance the needs of pilgrims, residents, and local economies. Rather than prescribing deterministic solutions, the framework functions as a flexible design logic that guides planners and architects in aligning spatial decisions with appresentational processes of meaning-making.
Ultimately, the research argues that regeneration in sacred urban contexts should be understood as a dynamic and adaptive process aimed at restoring meaningful presence rather than merely improving spatial performance. By foregrounding the Field of Appresentation as the core analytical and design framework, the study offers a systematic way to reconnect human experience, spatial structure, and sacred meaning in the spaces and places surrounding the Holy Shrine of Imam Reza (AS). Beyond the specific case of Mashhad, the proposed approach contributes to broader debates on sacred space, phenomenology, and meaning-based urban regeneration by demonstrating how experiential theory can be rigorously translated into spatial analysis and design practice.