Analysis of Factors of Affecting City Skylines

City view can be considered as the embodiment of cityscape and affects social and economic values. Historical cities in Iran and Europe have had a kind of harmony between physical and social fabrics which in turn shows what great attention has been paid to skyline and its details. Nowadays, however, fast-occurring changes inhibit the linking of social character and physical fabric and giving rise to extraversion. The only thing observable in general these days is fabrics with no identity containing monotonous space or highly visionary chaos. This article tries to address various reasons that affect the shaping of cities and their skylines through the thematic study of some reasons such as supernatural or ideological, secular, natural, technological, administrative, economic and social reasons. Based on the chronological studies, Primary cities were more or less influenced by supernatural and then secular or natural reasons. Due to these reasons, they tend to have an organic fabric and a kind of harmony in their skylines. It is observable that in this era, the most important parts of a city are the most public ones. It is by no means difficult to distinct public spaces due to their hierarchical organization. In the next section, through a critical point of view, modern and pre modern skylines are compared. Modern skyline, which has emerged with modern notions as a symbol of speed and the machine era, is being influenced by economic and capitalistic reasons. In this era we deal with the “reification of skyline”. City skyline has been sacrificed by the economic power of these reasons and, as a result, it has lost its human scale as one of the important aspects of pre modern cities. A comparison between the pre-modern skyline and its successors shows that the reasons which affect city skylines have risen in the modern era. Following the logic of the modern era, many reasons separate themselves from metaphysics and monarchies, though this separation is uncontrolled. Modern era, however, is divided into three parts: Primarymodern, great-modern and post-modern eras. Due to the great improvement in technology, primary-modern cities could be regarded as machine cities. On the other hand, technology empowers classes which cannot be considered as independent till those times such as Fordism. Since that time, these classes have developed the ability to control capital and following that, they managed to affect the evaluations of cities. In the late modern era, economic power got stronger as neo-liberalism emerged and played a major role in the form of city skylines. Public spaces have gotten increasingly privatized. Due to all of these, the modern era is to be recognized as plural in reasons. Besides recognizing all the reasons shaping cities, it is essential to control the construction in a way that skyline turns to be the symptom of urban space. The Economic reason is to be controlled by the administrative and social reasons should be taken into account. As pre-modern cities, The Human scale can be already considered as the most important factor of our cities.