One of the most compelling reasons of residential crisis in downtown districts is developing trends. Reduction quality of residential texture and new developments’ attraction lead to more pollution and destroyed gradually. Texture of the downtown area of Mashhad is faced with such a phenomenon. Moreover, the existence of Imam Reza holy shrine and numerous local and foreign visitors increased the significance of pursuing and rectification of the problems. The present article seeks to evaluate and identify threatening factors, their roots, lack of desirability, and reduction of quality in residential zones, and is looking for some solutions to prevent the continuity of the current trend and restore the concept of “stability” in such tissues with the aim of creating the sense of sustainability. Therefore, the main issue of the current study is to find out the quality of residential tissue of the city center and its developmental criteria. The applied method is a combination of qualitative content analysis and survey. Literature content analysis and related theoretical principles explained the indexes, desirability criteria, and surrounding quality for sustainable residence. The obtained results were used for determining morphological damages and quality assessment of the Sarshor and Chahno districts, as the most important residential zones in the city center. In this regard, a combination of field research and analysis of citizens, workers and visitors’ questionnaire was used. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method and Expert Choice software were used for ranking and criteria and indexes analysis. Results emphasized that environmental quality criteria, including experimental-perceptual, population- social- economic, ecological, in four main dimensions and based on functional priority have significant effect on amount of sustainability in residential tissue. The Analytic Hierarchy Process results indicated that multiple land use criteria and a balance between jobs and housing in functional dimension, durability coefficient and controllable expenses of housing in social-population-economic dimension, the absence of pollutants in ecological dimension, and two other criteria, namely citizen satisfaction and environmental security In perceptual-experimental dimension are the most prominent criteria affecting the quality of the aforementioned districts. These factors yielded the most important results in binary assessment among variables. 0.03 of analysis inconsistency rate is a sign of accurate judgment among criteria and indexes. By making alterations to the rest of neighborhood tissues of the district in city center, the suggested criteria and indexes of this study can be employed.

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