The Role of Natural Environment in Creating Sense of Place in the urban Resident

Courtyards as original spaces in traditional houses, create a sense of place for the residents; these interstitial spaces, had a significant role in everyday activities and made the human-environment bonding possible in the traditional housing(whether between the buildings in the residential complex or between the internal space and the path or surrounding buildings). But in contemporary buildings as a result of dense population and reduction of land capitation, this vital element disappeared, and the form of everyday activities of this functional space changed for other functions with the least spatial capitation; as a result, the human-environment bonding has also changed. However, due to the growing and inevitable need to construct apartments and residential complexes in contemporary societies, the purpose of this article is finding the lost human-environment bonding, and replacing the traditional courtyards with appropriate alternative functional and behavioral elements in the contemporary housing. The theory of the research based on the dialectic of indoor and outdoor spaces in traditional Iranian courtyards, relies on sense of place as the causes for resident's satisfaction and the qualitative factor for planning future housing.