Environmental Planning Strategies for Religious Cities

Ahlam Hassan Jassim Abdul Karim
Supervised by Asst. Prof. Dr. Fawaz Hamdan Aboud

The process of preserving and maintaining the environment is an important indicator in contemporary global issues, especially after the environmental deterioration that has negatively affected the quality of life of residents and public services. The importance of developing any urban strategy for any religious city lies in studying the actual reality of the city’s basic plan to determine the reality of the interaction of spatial relationships between urban land uses and the sites allocated to it that are trying to exploit them for specific time periods and spatial circumstances. Since the basic design means “a framework that deals with the units of time and place together with their variables in the form of specific time stages”, the design must therefore achieve the aspirations of the city and keep pace with its urban and population growth stages and be consistent with the planning objectives. Accordingly, the city plan must accommodate the spatial development indicators, especially the city of Karbala, which is still working within the Docksides Company’s plan of 1956, through which the city expanded significantly on its southern and southeastern sides after crossing its walls, which represent the physical entity of most Islamic cities.