Abstract
PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF URBAN PLANNING THEORIES FOR TOURIST SITES IN IRAQ CHOSEN CITIES STUDY
Religious tourism is one of the most important areas of tourism in Islamic and Arab countries in general. From this standpoint, religious tourism has a great place in Iraq as a country with a history dating back seven thousand years. Iraq has gone through many historical stages and there have been many nations that settled therein and made it their home and starting point before Islam and even after it, these nations, although they absorbed Iraq’s wealth and created many negatives , have archaeological remains whose discovery has not yet ended, and perhaps those antiquities are what
raised the country’s tourist status.
Because geography is a comprehensive science, studying the historical dimension of selected sites that have a large number of religious monuments that have made them a destination for the eyes and visitors is one of the priorities of the researcher’s study of this ancient science, while studying religious tourism within the ordeals, it has an additional aspect that must be studied, which is the urban geography of these cities. Therefore, the researcher chose this complex topic, which includes a special study of two of the most important tourist governorates in Iraq, namely Holy Karbala and Najaf Al-Ashraf, with a special depiction on the link between the trends of modern urban theories and the role of religious tourism in shaping urbanism in these cities . As studies have been conducted on taking care of the non-formal in Design and planning of cities in general, but the importance of these modern trends was chosen, and by applying them to those selected sites, it was found that the development characteristic of religious tourism in those areas is the randomness of the decision in urbanization, so there is no planning or giving priority except to the religious function without the participation of the population and developing religious tourism so
that it becomes internal and external.
Keywords
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