Regeneration and revival of historical context
Nasim Leilieyoun; Ahmad Danaeinia
Abstract
The formation and development framework of the historical core of Isfahan is based on the system of (water channels) called "Madi". On a macro scale, Madi has had a direct impact on the configuration and organization of urban spaces, and on a micro scale, it has influenced the settlement of ...
Read More
The formation and development framework of the historical core of Isfahan is based on the system of (water channels) called "Madi". On a macro scale, Madi has had a direct impact on the configuration and organization of urban spaces, and on a micro scale, it has influenced the settlement of residential units. This element, during changes that primarily occurred after the 1960s, has gradually become a barrier to the development of urban-local spaces. The aim of this research is to clarify the characteristics of Madi flexibility and its impact on the housing configuration, thereby revealing the necessity of re-linking housing architecture with this vital element. The research combines quantitative and qualitative methods and is based on observation and analysis methodologies. Data were collected in two phases: library studies and field surveys, aimed at finding the housing pattern and how residential units are organized, with results extracted based on two methods of inference and content analysis. Basic information was obtained through aerial photographs from the 1960s and analyzed using software such as AutoCAD, GIS, and Depthmap. The findings indicate that the housing configuration system is shaped based on four indices: building pattern, area, the ratio of built space to open space, and spatial integrity and coherence. The most compatible housing construction pattern is the single-row construction and fully constructed, followed by U-shaped and L-shaped patterns. Regarding the area index, residential plots with an area of 200-500 square meters and subsequently 500-1000 square meters, and in the index of built-to-open space ratio, areas with values between 0.70-0.96 have the highest flexibility. As for the index of spatial integrity and coherence, the maximum index includes the axis of Madi, passages connected to Madi, and passages connected to the main streets bordering the neighborhood. The results show that Madi architecture is in complete connection with the city and the neighborhood, representing the most important natural pattern influencing the formation of residential units and creating interconnection throughout the neighborhood. In order to create or strengthen this pattern, housing design based on the four enumerated indices plays a significant role. Conversely, neglecting these indices will have numerous negative effects on the housing configuration and the system of neighborhoods.
Urban Sustainability
Zahra Babaei frooshani; Yones Changalvaiee
Abstract
Highlights Evaluation and comparison of key indicators of wind energy flows and their evaluation in the sustainability of urban morphology. Investigation of wind flow in three real urban patterns that represent the three general morphologies of the city of Isfahan. Numerical simulations were performed ...
Read More
Highlights Evaluation and comparison of key indicators of wind energy flows and their evaluation in the sustainability of urban morphology. Investigation of wind flow in three real urban patterns that represent the three general morphologies of the city of Isfahan. Numerical simulations were performed to visualize the steady state of three real urban patterns. Several urban morphological indices were found with high correlation with wind energy indices. Intervention and development strategies to reduce the negative effects of wind flow for urban management of Isfahan. Introduction The development of wind energy in built environments is an old topic concerning sustainable urban residents, which has appealed to many researchers with the enhancement of new technologies and CFD techniques. This work seeks to study wind energy flows from the perspective of urban morphology. Methodology In this research, the average numerical wind data have been collected from Isfahan meteorological station on the hottest day (21 July 2017) and the coldest day (20 January 2018) in the corresponding Iranian year for CFD studies on wind distribution in three urban configurations (traditional, gridded, and high-rise buildings) in local scale, which represents the overall structure of the morphological types in the city of Isfahan, Iran. The CFD have been numerically simulated and illustrated in the ENVI-met and DesignBuilder software to visualize the wind energy results obtained from each urban fabric. Results and Discussion The simulation results demonstrate the following. 1) The results for the traditional fabric based on the maximum value of wind speed and direction obtained from the software include 2.26 m/s on the hottest day and 2.68 on the coldest, lying in the category of gentle breeze based on the Beaufort scale. In terms of the comfort zone for activities such as sitting, standing, and walking, this does not cause problems for citizens, and the texture lies in the comfort zone. 2) The results involving the maximum value of wind speed and direction in the gridded fabric include 2.73 m/s on the hottest day and 2.80 on the coldest. For high-rise buildings, maximum wind speed is 4.26 m/s on the hottest day and 4.08 on the coldest. On the basis of the Beaufort scale, therefore, gridded and high-rise buildings lie in the medium breeze category. Moreover, the comfort zone for the sitting and standing activities in the gridded fabric is not a problem for citizens, but makes them feel a little uncomfortable with the walking activity. For high-rise buildings, however, there are many problems, and citizens feel plenty of discomfort based on the comfort range for the sitting, standing, and walking activities. 3) The results obtained from the study of the two pieces of software demonstrate that the power and accuracy of the numerical simulation made by ENVI-met is greater than that of DesignBuilder due to the focus and design of the former software in the field of urban planning, providing researchers with more accurate documentation. Conclusion The results of the analysis are as follows. 1) The traditional fabric has been designed entirely based on the principles of sustainability. The urban morphological parameters indicate the important role that urban architects and designers can play in optimal energy consumption with respect to wind flow by determining the morphological parametric criteria. 2) The overall analyses of the geometry of the two new fabrics (gridded and high-rise buildings) demonstrate that modern urban planning is in less accordance with the natural environment, including climatic conditions and indigenous culture. 3) The large differences between the three fabrics in terms of the different characteristics of urban morphology and the different effects of wind energy flow indicate the significant effect of urban morphology on potential wind flows, showing that the urban morphological indicators are significantly correlated with wind flow. 4) The results can be used as a practical guide for evaluation of the effects of urban wind flows and their interaction with urban morphology. The methods proposed in this study can be used as maximal analyses made for practical measures taken to reduce the negative effects of wind flow for urban management in Isfahan. Future extensions of this study, which is currently under investigation, will be aimed at a comprehensive examination of all climatic factors affecting urban morphology and, finally, achievement of an optimal, sustainable model for Isfahan and all climates in Iran along with the factors examined in this research.
Urban Planning
boshra mohajer; zahed shafiee; alireza khaje ahmad attari; mohammad taghi toghraee
Abstract
Tourism is an inclusive, public industry that needs to consider all the sectors of the society regardless of age, race, or gender. Tourism and travel must be accessible to all people, including those with disabilities, the elderly, and children. Therefore, it must be an intrinsic part of any responsible, ...
Read More
Tourism is an inclusive, public industry that needs to consider all the sectors of the society regardless of age, race, or gender. Tourism and travel must be accessible to all people, including those with disabilities, the elderly, and children. Therefore, it must be an intrinsic part of any responsible, sustainable tourism policy or strategy. Children are the present and future tourists, who play an important role in destination management. Since they are an important part of the society, it is a requirement to pay attention to the promotion of their creativity, where art can play an important role. Art is a means for creative self-expression. For children, art can be a wonderful emotional outlet that promotes personal reflection, communication skills, and self-esteem. Promotion of creativity and engagement in artistic activities has been shown to stimulate growth in important cognitive areas. On the other hand, tourism has been redirected from cultural tourism, as the second generation, towards creative tourism, as the third generation. Creative tourism has turned away from tangible heritage and sightseeing towards more intangible cultural and authentic experiences. Therefore, it has attracted more attention, as tourists are looking for more authentic, meaningful experiences. Tourist destinations compete to introduce themselves as creative ones in order to meet the needs of travelers, accelerate their economy, and restructure themselves through cultural regeneration. The present paper sought to identify children as emerging markets for creative tourism and specify its key components and to examine the factors effective on child-based creative tourism. Creative tourists are the creators of their own experiences; therefore, they must act as a homogeneous group of producers with creative ideas about their creative experiences. A creative city in the field of crafts, the city of Isfahan, Iran has the potential to become a creative tourism destination based on handicrafts and folk arts, which also seeks to join child-friendly cities. Local authorities believe that tailoring the notion of child-friendly cities with arts and crafts will help Isfahan improve its image, turning the city into an attractive creative destination for children. As playing games and learning are children’s basic expectations from a child-friendly city, they prefer places that afford them opportunities to play and learn actively. Therefore, crafts and folk arts could play an important role in meeting children’s expectations from Isfahan as a creative destination, because the city is a point of reference in Iran and around the world, also nominated the “World City of Handicraft” by the World Crafts Council. As interaction with crafts is acknowledged as an appropriate tool for playing, it can boost children’s creativity, and provide an opportunity for active learning. The main purpose of this study was to obtain a single definition of child-centered creative tourism. The data were collected using snowball sampling and in-depth interviews with 31 tourism, art and handicraft, and children experts. The research used a qualitative method and the thematic theory approach for the identification of the components. The data were categorized based on open, axial, and selective coding. As a result, five distinct components were identified: travel content, children’s needs, creativity, environment, and stakeholders. Each component included several factors that could provide new information on creative tourism for children. This notion and the findings can help destinations to attract children as creative tourists, and their product update will lead to experience and creativity.
Urban Planning
Elham Ghasemi; Mojtaba Rafieian
Abstract
Urban development is aimed at meeting public interest, but it sometimes leads to conflicts between the goals and accepted results of different groups and contributors. The significance of managing these conflicts as a methodological, practical approach is highlighted by the background of its impacts. ...
Read More
Urban development is aimed at meeting public interest, but it sometimes leads to conflicts between the goals and accepted results of different groups and contributors. The significance of managing these conflicts as a methodological, practical approach is highlighted by the background of its impacts. Recent models of conflict management include public-private partnership in urban development (3P) and public-private-people partnership (partnership model) (4P). Public-private-people partnership is a new concept in urban planning, establishing new ways to improve the inclusion of various public-sector actors, private actors, residents, NGOs, and other civil-society actors in planning processes. The notion of 4P has arisen partly to respond to the criticism of public-private partnerships for insufficient inclusion of citizens, NGOs, and other actors in the civil society, and is used to refer to a variety of processes involving public actors, private actors, citizens, and NGOs in urban planning. For an understanding of 4Ps, it is useful to have a basic understanding of the background of public-private partnerships. In general, partnerships are urban development tools involving changes where strategic planning arises alongside more traditional land-use planning, and the roles of public- and private-sector actors, residents, and associations are reassessed and changed in a process that is perceived as a shift from government to governance. The concept of governance focuses on the interplay between the public sector and other actors in a situation where the public sector is no longer delivering all public goods and instead has the role of coordinating public actors at different levels and private actors and other partners. Central in the shift from government to governance is also the blending of public and private resources for delivery of public goods. In high-standard urban development projects, therefore, where common visions are created, and conflicting goals are managed, the strengths of each type of actor are utilized. The government provides the resources and a long-term development framework, and citizen initiatives organize and activate citizens to act, while companies provide the kinds of service that are demanded, and produce tax revenues for the government.This applied, perceptual research uses a qualitative method involving interpretation, and provides descriptions of the 3P and 4P aspects, addressing conflict management in the new 4P model using library documentation and a simple overview. For data collection in a case study of Jahan-Nama Citadel in the city of Isfahan, Iran, a semi-structured interview method was used to identify the problems with the project and to specify the conflicts between actors, including beneficiaries and stakeholders. Finally, the intergroup conflicts in the project were analyzed using the achievement matrix. The inter-organizational conflicts between the public and private sectors and the groups of people in the project were considered in three areas: land ownership (the land owners in the caravanserai), the type of land use proposed for the area (switching from green space to cultural and, ultimately, commercial uses), and the physical type of construction of the citadel, (regardless of the Naghshe Jahan Square skyline altitude). It was concluded that both the public and private sectors and different groups of people involved in the design and planning process have caused conflicts through their failure to recognize the actors in the Jahan-Nama Citadel project and to consider partnership in a wider sense (sharing the profits and losses and innovations of the plan), which has hindered achievement of the plan objectives.
Urban Planning
ahmad shahivandi
Abstract
The creative city perspective is based on the use of all city potentials to improve public spaces, culture, security, safety and communications. One of the most important tools to do so is new technologies including communication and electronic networks. Technologies, including ICT, are instrumrnts that ...
Read More
The creative city perspective is based on the use of all city potentials to improve public spaces, culture, security, safety and communications. One of the most important tools to do so is new technologies including communication and electronic networks. Technologies, including ICT, are instrumrnts that can act as a mechanism for the establishment of creative cities using the global experiences. The dissemination of information through Internet, communication through e-mail and municipalities’ websites, and the use of virtual reality communication to highlight the results of a planning process serve as a new tool to achieve transparency, accountability and efficiency in urban systems. With the passage of time and rapid evolution of technologies in Isfahan , as one of the cultural and historical cities of Iran, there is a need for changes in the attitude and style of architecture and urban design that fit people’ everyday needs and problems. Electronic tools seek to create a virtual world. In the field of urban planning, they seek to create shopping places, offices, banks, etc., such that there would be little need for physical construction and creative people would use their technical knowledge and intelligence to provide high quality services, and physical buildings would be replaced with communications and network infrastructure. At the same time, a large part of urban spaces would be changed into recreation and leisure time places.Therefore, this research investigates the impact of new technologies on creative city with an emphasis on Isfahan. In this research, some features such as “variety, universality and being up-to-date”, as ICT’s criteria, have been studied in order to fulfil the indexes of creative city including “creativity and domestic potential, physical-spatial structure of the city and socio-economic properties”. This research is practical in terms of purpose and descriptive-analytic in terms of methodology. Library studies and inquiry method are used to gather information. The field study data is obtained by distributing questionnaires among 210 urban experts and 30 IT experts in Isfahan. After entering the variables and editing them in SPSS, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling in Amos Graphic was used to classify variables and demonstrate the relationship between new communication technologies and creative city. Likert scale was used to measure the variables. The obtained results show that the factor of being up-to-date has an impact on all aspects of creative city such as creativity and domestic potential, physical structure of city and socio-economic properties; the effect of this factor is more significant than other factors (such as universality and variety of new technologies). The universality factor only affects creativity and improving domestic potential and variety of new technologies factor only influences the socio-economic function of the city.In other words, we can say that being up-to-date in different sites and providing online information can increase creativity and improve the domestic potential, change physical and spatial structure of the city, improve social science and reduce personal referrals. Based on the results, the impact of being up-to-date on the factors of creative city is more significant than that of other factors, but the ideal situation for realization of creative city will occur when the new technologies in different aspects are able to have positive effects on the social and physical structure of the city.
Urban Design
Mina Kashani Hamedani
Volume 4, Issue 14 , May 2015, , Pages 19-30
Abstract
Urban space is the context in which the activities and different perception of users take place; but various users such as different age groups have dissimilar perceptions of environment. It seems that the built environment and particularly urban space as the product of work of urban planners, urban ...
Read More
Urban space is the context in which the activities and different perception of users take place; but various users such as different age groups have dissimilar perceptions of environment. It seems that the built environment and particularly urban space as the product of work of urban planners, urban designers and architects, does not necessarily consider the real variety of users and through this fact, aesthetic aspect of urban environment does not fulfill their needs fairly. Overlapping of the two domains of environmental psychology and urban aesthetics on the one hand and the diverse psychological characteristics in different age groups on the other hand confirm the necessity of this research. The need for studying urban aesthetics is re-affirmed also from a statistical point of view. In 2010 demographics, out of seven billion of the world’s population, approximately 1.2 billion were children between the ages of 5 and 14. This figure is approximately 17.4 percent of the total world population or one-fifth. The same statistics is shown in Iran where there were roughly 11 million children (5-14 age range) from the total population of 74 million in 2010 which is approximately 15 percent and or one-sixth of the total population. These official statistics are demonstrate the importance children in different fields generally and especially in urban design and urban aesthetic. Studying urban aesthetics from the viewpoint of particular users of urban space like children with different psychological characteristics leads to an introduction to urban aesthetics which is trying to find the answer to the research question. The objective is to identify the aesthetic preferences of children in their surrounding environment, especially in urban spaces. However, there were some limits in this study; the most important limiting factor was the lack of detailed information regarding the social and cultural environment of the statistical sample which could explain differences in children’s points of views. Thus, examining urban spaces from an aesthetic perspective is important because their users have different aesthetic perceptions and urban spaces are not necessarily responsive for all kinds of users. This research answers the following questions: which environmental aesthetic preferences can be recognized in different groups of children and adults, and what are the priorities of related variables in different groups. There are two major approaches to the study of aesthetics, empirical and philosophical. This research is based on the empirical approach according to the importance of visual aspects in urban design. This research has studied the signification of three groups conforming to Santayana’s classification of environmental aesthetics which consists of three categories of emotional, formal and symbolic. The research is applied and descriptive-analytic. Data was collected from library study based on documentary research as well as field observations and children’s drawings. Based on Cochran's C test, 750 effective questionnaires were dispensed in Isfahan city which is the figure for the statistical population. The results were analyzed by Likert-Scale and SPSS software. The findings indicate certain differences exist between the various age groups in their preferences of aesthetic priority and in the importance of formal variables from the viewpoint of children. Of the three mentioned categories of environmental aesthetics, the formal category was most frequently preferred by children.
H P; B F
Volume 3, Issue 10 , May 2014, , Pages 49-62
Abstract
Urban sprawl is a physical-spatial phenomenon. It is a kind of scattered, leapfrog, and low density horizontal urban growth far from urban centers and is usually followed by non mixed-use development. It can demonstrate resource and capital waste, threat to citizens’ health, environmental degradation, ...
Read More
Urban sprawl is a physical-spatial phenomenon. It is a kind of scattered, leapfrog, and low density horizontal urban growth far from urban centers and is usually followed by non mixed-use development. It can demonstrate resource and capital waste, threat to citizens’ health, environmental degradation, change city centers to deteriorated urban areas due to peripheral suburban growth pattern. The causes, patterns, consequences, costs and benefits of urban growth and sprawl, have been discussed by several researchers. However, these experts have not operated in the same way in regards the causes, patterns, costs and mechanism in this case. Most of the literature concerning urban sprawl often confuses causes, consequences, the many conditions, and spatial patterns. The theoretical question of this research is as follows: what the dimensions of urban sprawl in the historical evolution of the metropolis are; what causes urban sprawl and by what mechanism does it work. In that regard, Isfahan was chosen as a case study due to its unbridled horizontal growth in the last few decades which has had social, economic, and environmental impacts such as dissipated agricultural lands, increased air pollution and its risks to citizen’s health, increased costs of transportation, social segregation, injured historical heritages because of increasing pollutions. Moreover, Isfahan plays a prominent role in the economy of Iran. On the one hand, it has a great economic potential in tourism and mass industries, and plays a leading role in regional agricultural economics due to its fertile lands and soil. Pathology of these suburban areas, process of urban sprawl, and its mechanism in Isfahan is the purpose of this research. It seems that the highest amount of urban sprawl has occurred at the outskirts of Isfahan municipality, in regions 7 and 14. The process of this sprawl can be determined by ecological-social processes of industrial establishment in the northern peripheral areas, formation of residential settlements for laborers, impact of cooperative housing activities, natural factors (water shortage), transportation network, rural to urban migration, and formation of Isfahan’s spatial pattern by industrial-agricultural-residential function. Urban Sprawl in Isfahan has challenged spatial policy-making. The greatest degree of urban sprawl has occurred in peripheral lands along the “Dolat-Abad” road; numerous villages that are near northern Isfahan villages like “Younart”, have become neighborhoods of the city. Car dependency has increased along with the duration of daily trips within the cit. Social segregation has developed as an informal settlement of “Hadi-Gol”. This is a challenge for the whole of Isfahan city and its metropolitan areas, not just for the north of it. In terms of economic and social policy making, segregation patterns, physical separation, structural-spatial order, the urban sprawl of Isfahan affects all further spatial policy making and planning. Systemic-historical analysis was used as a method of proving the aforementioned hypothesis and exploratory factor analysis was used to distinguish the suburban areas where the most sprawl has occurred.
