Evaluation of Rural Housing Structural Transformations Based on the Rural Livelihood; Case Study: Riab Village in Khorasan Razavi Province

Examining and recognizing rural areas and analyzing their capabilities and their planning bottlenecks in the process of rural development are very important. The villages of the country have not been functioning with their full capacity for several years due to various reasons. Rural housing as a symbol of the efficient interaction of people with the natural environment around himself, according to the time-space conditions, accommodated various adaptive transformations with according to the correspondent livelihood and the architectural practices. From this perspective, rural housing can be viewed as a display of how environmental and functional changes have influenced the livelihoods of villages, through which they have altered the residential architecture.
The new housing type in the historical village of Riab, as compared to the traditional and native dwellings exhibits strong disparity. The grassroots of such changes leads to the top-down regional planning and development projections according to the theories discussed in modern geography. The present research, via explaining the causes and factors influencing rural life, attempts to explain the nature of rural life influences on the structure of rural housing architecture, to examine the changes of rural housing from traditional-native housing to new housing in a the selected case study. This is achieved through combined descriptive-analytical approach, while studying library resources and field observations, and analyzed the changes in the structure of rural housing architecture.
In order to study the changes in the architecture of rural houses as well as comparing two types of native historical and new architectural structures, the statistical population of the study is selected from the two housing typology. This is done by considering entire residential area of the historical village of Riab from the two constructional patterns mentioned in the classified disproportionate sampling method. The dual classification has been made based on two types of native-traditional and new construction according to observation and field surveys. Then an analysis of case studies of the by Cochran volume determination method and simple random sampling method, from the total of existing building blocks in the village is conducted.
According to the findings of the research, rural life can be considered effective from four dimensions: socio-cultural, economic, environmental and institutional (human). Certain socio-cultural and economic dimensions have an indispensable role in such transformations, and the environmental and institutional dimensions provide the building blocks of rural housing architecture. In general, according to the analysis of the changes in the structure of rural housing architecture in Riab, main changes could be indicated in three categories: changes in the spatial organization, physical elements, and functional role of housing. The changes in the functional dimension of rural housing include removal of certain native historical spaces and the addition of new ones as well as transition and substitution of existent spaces. In the physical dimension, it is found that material and structural changes, ornamental simplification have been noticeable. In spatial organization dimension, the changes in spatial integration and spatial configuration were among evident findings.