The Role of " Everyday Landscape" in the Quality of Urban Spaces, Case Study: Girl's Dormitory Route in Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran

Nature has always been a retreat and an inspiration for humans, satisfying many needs in life including a sense of aesthetics. “Everyday landscapes” which contain many of the attributes of natural environments also serve to connect humans with their surrounding elements and conditions. In addition, everyday landscapes have an impact on the daily interactions and activities of people and serve to better understand the social processes and landscape structures and elements. Since the relationship between humans and nature is no longer in a desired or meaningful state, this research focuses on the principal aspects of everyday landscape and its impact on human cognition from a landscape architecture viewpoint. To do this, a visual assessment case study of a section of the route to the girls’ dormitory in Shahid Beheshti University was conducted.
Based on a combined qualitative/quantitative method, qualities of landscape especially those of everyday landscape were assessed by analyzing cognitive maps of 40 girl students. The data from the field survey was then analyzed using the Shannon entropy method. Besides revealing some of the important elements of everyday landscape and their cognition, findings show that qualitative variables of legibility, complexity, coherence, and mystery are the priorities of participants, respectively. It is evident that user priorities among the variables of everyday landscape and in architectural, landscape architectural and urban design activities can help develop and generalize qualitative and quantitative environmental goals throughout the planning and design of urban spaces.