Colorful Urban Moving Landscape and Women’s Quality of Life

Color is one of the most important elements in urban landscape, which its intuition depends  on a variety of objective and subjective factors.  Color, in different situations, can affect psychological conditions of people and their quality  of life. The urban colorful landscape includes various sections of building facades, flooring, and  furniture as fixed and semi-permanent elements,  and the color of clothing and vehicles of citizens  as moving elements in space. Significance of  urban colorful landscape in Iran is due to neutrality of colors used in the buildings, in addition  to women’s generally dark colors of clothing or vehicle. Therefore, the image of the cities are  completely neutralized with dark and dead colors. Such a color palette can lead to depression  of the citizens. Studies have been conducted at  the world’s color research institutes on women’s  color preferences. However , theoretically and  practically this is a novel topic in Iran.  The present article, through an overview of  colorful urban landscape with a gender sensi tive approach, presents an example of urban  landscape color analysis by application of Image  Color Analyzer and compares images of selected locations in Iran and foreign countries.   Impact  indicators of the study are extracted. Women’s desired colors for clothes and vehicles against their color selection for public appearances and  cars is evaluated and analyzed. 300 female residence of the city of Tehran constitutes the sample of the study. Based on the finding; women  prefer most luminous colors for their clothing or vehicle. However, due to societal norms, they are not willing to try on cloths with their favorable colors and mostly use dark and dead colors. Strategies to intervene in the cities’ colorful landscape with emphasize on women’s preferences are proposed in the last section of the article.