Urban Planning
Seyyed Jamal Seyyed Hashemi; Hamidreza Jayhani
Abstract
In the second half of the past century, urban development programs, including master and comprehensive plans, have led to extensive intervention in ancient cities, while the construction of streets had already led to substantial changes therein. An examination of the interventions indicates their inefficiency ...
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In the second half of the past century, urban development programs, including master and comprehensive plans, have led to extensive intervention in ancient cities, while the construction of streets had already led to substantial changes therein. An examination of the interventions indicates their inefficiency in solving urban problems. At the same time, these interventions have led to new issues, including a lack of integrity in the historic urban areas and their fabrics. In this article, the impact of the new streets in the Sultan Mir Ahmad neighborhood in the city of Kashan, Iran was investigated. The process of urban changes in Kashan was organic until the early 20th century, limited to areas around the heart of the city, the historic bazaar, and the governmentcitadel. Subsequently, the pattern of urban development changed, and construction of straight, long streets was prioritized in line with the growing trend of modernization and the expansion of automobile use. The two streets of Fazel Naraqi and Alavi have been constructed with an interval of about two decades near the Sultan Mir Ahmad neighborhood. One is located to the north of the neighborhood, and the other separates a part of the area from its larger part. This article sought to study how the two streets influence the spatial structure of the Sultan Mir Ahmad neighborhood. For a thorough analysis of the changes that have occurred, the space syntax method was used. Therefore, axial maps of Kashan were provided for three periods: the 1920s, 1960s, and 2010s. Then, the area under investigation was analyzed using integration, depth, and choice as indicators. The results demonstrated an enhancement in global integration as a result of the construction of the Fazel Naraqi and Alavi streets. It should be noted, however, that the impacts of the two streets are different. Alavi Street has had a greater influence due to its proximity to the center of the neighborhood and intersection with its main paths. Subsequently, it was found through an investigation of the local integration and choice indicators that the center of the region had lost its original position, and that Alavi Street had come to be known as the most crowded, most accessible route in the region as the new center of the urban area, with the old heart of the neighborhood turned into a sub-center. In fact, two events have occurred along with the emergence of the development plans and construction of straight streets at the heart of the fabric. Firstly, the construction of streets nearthe neighborhood intersecting its major paths has led to an increase in accessibility and integrity and a decrease in the depth of the urban area. At the same time, however, part of the neighborhood that is adjacent to new communication routes has experienced increased permeability and accessibility. This has caused the inner parts of the neighborhood, including the historic center, to lose their positions in the urban spatial structure and turn into sub-centers.
Urban Design
Abstract
The public spaces of city shape social flows, provide the material needs of citizens, their intrinsic need for communication and face-to-face social interactions. Therefore, the quality of urban spaces in the formation of social interactions, the mental image of the city and its visualization are important. ...
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The public spaces of city shape social flows, provide the material needs of citizens, their intrinsic need for communication and face-to-face social interactions. Therefore, the quality of urban spaces in the formation of social interactions, the mental image of the city and its visualization are important. Several factors play a role in the formulation of the concept of quality, the most important of which is the configuration of urban spaces. The spatial configuration organizes the relationships between urban spaces. It is a factor in shaping qualitative variables such as readability and accessibility. Parks are one of the urban spaces whose social performance and productivity are directly affected by spatial quality. However, urban parks are now the epicenter of most social anomalies due to different factors and, as public spaces, are less able to provide a suitable environment for the formation of social interactions. In recent decades, the theory of space layout has made it possible to analyze the spatial configuration and its relationship with social, economic and physical factors using spatial variables.The present study investigates the structure and analyzes the features of spatial configuration of Mashhad in order to examine its effects on the spatial quality of urban parks. Configuration analysis provides an appropriate assessment of the spatial distribution, accessibility, security and readability of urban parks and can play an important role in redefining the quality of urban parks spatially. Since parks play an important role in urban spaces, evaluation of the layout, spatial distribution and access to urban parks in Mashhad are among the most important goals of the study. In addition, the readability and security of Mashhad parks are other parameters that are studied in this study using the space-layout theory variables. The present research is an applied research with a descriptive-analytical method. The statistical sample involves 290 parks in Mashhad in the five categories of neighborhood, local, district, region, and city. The research was conducted using spatial variables of space layout. The theoretical framework of the research was developed based on documentary and library studies with the aim of explaining the dimensions of spatial quality. Also, the city’s statistics in 2014, land use maps of 2011 (1/200 scale), satellite images and field surveys were used to analyze the data and collect information about the urban parks in Mashhad. The analyses were conducted in the GIS environment and 10 UCL Depthmap based on Mashhad’s axial map. The basic variables in this study were connectivity, interconnection, and control. The intermediate variables were readability, accessibility, space security, and cohesion. Research results show that despite the large dispersion of parks in the city, there is a spatial logic between the performance of parks and the city’s configuration. While regional parks are expected to be more readable in the structure and configuration of the city of Mashhad than district parks, the analyses show that they are less visible and accessible than other parks. The spatial distribution of these parks and their placement in spaces with a greater depth has decreased their spatial quality. Thus, one cannot expect significant functional and social effectiveness from this category of parks. In terms of spatial quality, urban parks are perhaps the only form of urban and social spaces that have the greatest impact on the spatial configuration of city due to their type of performance. The results of this study show that the distribution of urban parks in Mashhad is less spatially hierarchical. Although the main parks are distributed on a city scale in accordance with the axes of association and readability, most regional and district parks do not have such a distribution. This feature also affects the spatial cohesion of urban parks in relation to the structure of Mashhad and reduces the quality of space. Finally, it can be of said that, regardless of the spatial cohesion of Mashhad, which has a weak correlation with the components of the urban space and the city as whole, all the research indicators related to the quality of parks in Mashhad are poor and weak. This necessitates the attention to the park’s functional scale in the planning process, the proper location of urban parks, and the proper design according to the urban spatial pattern. Also, an assessment of the category of parks found that despite the number of neighborhood and local parks, these types of parks are better in terms of control than other parks, which seem to be logical according to the functional radius on a local scale. However, urban parks are of great importance in terms of accessibility and readability in the current structure of Mashhad. It seems that the assessment of spatial quality and its relationship with function can have an effective role in the planning and design of urban parks.
