The Role of Physical Factors Affecting the Neighborhood Attachment Based on Perceived Residential Environment Quality’s Indicator, Case Study: Joolan Neighborhood in Hamedan

The recent changes in the cities have made the public scene of the city and the sweetest memories of the people become unfamiliar spaces. The attachment to places in individuals creates the incentive to rehabilitate and rebuild everything from domestic and local environments. Feelings of affiliation and participation can provide a platform for participatory democracy and bring different economic and social plans in the local community with great success and improve quality of life. Most theorists agree that creating emotional links with the place is a prerequisite for psychological balance that is needed to overcome identity crises and can provide a context for people to engage in local activities. One of the elements that creates this emotional bond with the location in the city is the citizens’ attachment to residential neighborhoods.
The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of physical features on place attachment.This paper concerns the relationship between inhabitants and their neighborhood of residence in the place attachment as a significant current psychology project, refers to Forming emotional bonds.
Joolan neighborhood is one of the historic sites of the old city of Hamedan, which has a special character in the organic texture of the city of Hamedan, and the existence of some historic houses has a value belonging to the famous Hamedanians strata and some historic elements that are witness to its historical identity. However, over the past decades, due to exhaustion and some rival urban development policies, the main inhabitants of the region have been displaced largely to migrants from surrounding villages and vulnerable strata, and to various social anomalies. That’s why each day the volume and depth of burns were added. Currently, the neighborhood is divided into two sections by the newly-changed street, with the northern part of the neighborhood having a new texture as a result of renovation and improvement measures undertaken in recent years, while the southern part has remained almost intact and has maintained its traditional texture.
This research has been done for measuring effective physical components on neighborhood attachment in two parts of a residential neighborhood context (traditional and new), on the basis of indexes of perceived residential environment quality (PREQ) in one of the traditional neighborhoods in Hamedan, Joolan. Considering that the purpose of this study is to investigate the physical elements affecting the attachment of the residents of the neighborhood and to compare these elements in the new and old textures of a neighborhood, the functional aspects in both of the contexts are constant and therefore, and are not measured. For this purpose, a trained interviewer, in places of the neighborhood (such as shops, parks, mosques, etc.) requested those who would like to participate in this study to complete the questionnaire. The research method of this study is quantitative and based on data gathering techniques including interviews, observation, questionnaires and documents and case study type (Joolan neighborhood). To collect data, a library and survey method and analysis of SPSS software, multiple linear regression, t-test and one-way ANOVA have been used. So, in the end, this research can measure the attachment to the location in the sample neighborhood (in two parts of the old and new) based on the criteria and based on the perceptions of the quality of the residential environment. Then, a sample of 354 persons of neighborhood residents was selected as half of them lived in traditional context (Physic) and the others were in new neighborhood context (modern apartment). They were asked to fill out a questionnaire consist of questions about nine indexes (physical and social) out of PREQ indexes, and one place attachment index (NA). In order to obtain the status of criteria in a total of 9 main factors of the research, 23 multi-criteria questionnaires were prepared in the form of a questionnaire, and then, using a 5-point Likert scale (totally agree to completely disagree). Findings show that building volume in old part has the most effect on place attachment in terms of physical dimension. External accessibility, building aesthetic, building density and green space indexes come as next priorities respectively. This is while, in new part of the neighborhood these priorities come as followed respectively: External accessibility, building density, internal accessibility, building aesthetic, building volume and green space.
Considering that, this study was conducted on a neighborhood in its two old and new sections, the role of functional and field indicators that are relatively similar at the neighborhood level has not been studied. Subsequent studies can compare all proven criteria of PREQ and NA in separate segments that are generally different from the old and the new ones