The fast growth of the number of tourists around the world, urbanism, development of technology and increase in the volume of data, has made the employment and appropriate use of modern technologies inevitable to organize tourist destinations. Currently, policy making, planning and administration of tourism are among the main priorities of related executive organizations. Therefore, the administration and planning department of tourism has begun its official scientific and executive activities as one of the divisions of Research Center of ACECR.

The network plan:

The department of planning and administration of tourism is studying the concerns of planning tourism within an organized 3-year network plan. This issue was of particular significance due to the status of the religious city of Mashhad in absorbing tourists and pilgrims. Nowadays, approximately 20 million tourists and pilgrims visit the city annually, which makes goal-oriented studies in this field highly necessary. Thus, the department has determined its major axes of activities in the network plan to be about issues of planning and administrating tourism. The field of activities of this department during the 3-year period of 2015-2017 has been as follows:

Administrative issues, planning, investigating the physical spaces of Mashhad in terms of significance and identity (the available and ruined spaces) to promote tourists' surroundings;

 The major goals of this network consist of promoting tourists' surroundings by considering places with significant identity value in Mashhad, investigating the important index and standards to identify places of significant identity value as a tourists' surroundings, investigating the international theoretical basics and experiences about valuable urban places, investigating the physical spaces of Mashhad in terms of significance and identity(the available and ruined spaces) in order to promote tourists' surroundings, and to investigate the opportunities and threats, strong and weak points opposing significant urban spaces in Mashhad, based on which the following major axes are defined for the network plan:

1. Basic studies on promoting tourists' surroundings by attending to places of significant identity value;
2. Identifying the indexes and appropriate standards of investigation of places of significant identity value;

Identifying the opportunities and threats in the face of valuable urban places;