An Analytical Approach to the Impact of Urban Physical Aspects on Culture emphasizing Urban Fabric Case Study: City of Qazvin

Culture, as a dynamic concept, has always been influenced by several elements and its constituents transforming by various indicators. In present societies, cultural changes are clearly visible and factors affecting these changes have become a controversial topic. Given the importance and role of knowledge of urban planning in improving the quality of life and promoting urban culture, the need to study how the physical environment affects culture, is clearly tangible. This paper aims to study the effect of urban physical aspects on culture. A “mixed” methodology is applied, thus content analysis is used in theoretical parts and then, direct and indirect observation –field study, surveying and testing- is used in the case study. In testing method, the effect of urban physical aspects, as independent variable, and elements of culture, as dependent variables, were measured. The concept of “culture” is divided into material and immaterial dimensions and includes four components of “language”, “beliefs”, “values” and “norms”. The concept of “urban physical aspects” is also divided into two “natural” and “artificial” dimensions, however, Manouchehr Mozayyani’s categorization is considered as the study’s framework in which urban physical aspects are divided into three scales of “city face”, “city image” and “city statue”. The assumptions were tested based on the analytical model of the research, and the findings presented. To prove that the hypotheses and findings are reliable, charts were measured using SPSS for being significant; results show that, most elements of culture are affected by physical aspects of the environment. Other results suggest that physical aspects have high, and very high effect on most people in the historical context, medium to high effect on residents in old context, and medium to low effect on people in modern context, and moving from historical context to the modern context, people’s values and norms are less affected by the city image. Moving from historical context to the new and modern one, the context of location has less effect on beliefs, and also strong elements such as religion and beliefs are more affected by education and family circumstances than the urban physical aspects. Urban physical aspects are more influential on external elements of culture such as lifestyle change, ethics and how to practice norms, etc.- and just over time, they affect the language of culture.