Developing an Applied Model for Explaining the Mental Structure of Cognitive Maps of People through Spatial-Morphological Analysis of Existing Urban Textures, Case Study: Historical Texture of Kerman

Theories of urban development have mentioned many advantages for using a structural approach. However, intuitive (and not objective) methods have been used to determine the main structure, which is essentially considered equivalent to the main passage network and public utilities. Since the mental conceptual structure is considered in a way that its components are combined to gether as a whole, the present study aims to develop an objective mechanism for extracting the mental structure of people about texture. Accordingly, this research seeks to answer the question that which elements and objective analysis have a greater impact on the explanation of the existing structures in the cognitive maps. In this regard, cognitive maps of people were collected through drawings and interviews, and the structure was extracted in three physical, functional and semantic dimensions. The analysis of the spatial values ​​associated with the network of passages and land use in the geographic information system as well as the spatial qualities and relationships were carried out using spatial analysis. Spatial integration between the mental structures of cognitive maps, on the one hand, and the objective analysis of passages, land uses and spatial layout, on the other hand,showed that "axial depth" analysis explains the physical dimension of mental structure (Correlation = 0.72361, Sig.