The road, as a structure, constitutes one of the four fundamental pillars of the spatial organization of the Iranian city and is its most significant independent element. The physical structuring of the road arises from its semantic structuring and its recognition as a place—rather than as a mere object or corridor. When perceived as a path—a lived and meaningful place—it possesses the capacity to integrate the city as a landscape phenomenon, a unified physical-semantic system. This semantic structuring of the road-as-path is the product of its inherent ontological attributes. Should the road be emptied of these attributes, its structural role within the city's spatial organization is disrupted. For the city is, fundamentally, a phenomenon emerging from a meaningful, human-dependent order, not a concrete, prescriptive entity.
In this paper, drawing on the city of Sirjan as a case study, the repercussions of the modern perceptual shift—reducing the road from a place/path to a mere corridor—on the place-based urban development process are examined. To this end, the city's transformations from the pre-Islamic period to the contemporary era are traced, centering on the road's role in these developments. Finally, the recent economic shifts linked to the mining industry expansion, along with their impact on the road's altered status in the city's current development, are outlined and their consequences assessed.