The Recognition and Application of Aesthetic Criteria for Local Streets’ Design; the Case of Qazvin’s Eastern Stretch of Shahid Ansari Street

Most pedestrian spaces in our cities lack the visual appeal, vividness and landscaping to offer pedestrians any satisfaction. Since the concept of beauty is qualitative and subject to interpretations, and enough has been said about it from theoretical and philosophical points of view, the main challenge here remains in how to measure, assess and apply beauty. One visually encounters a lot of things in local streets. The recreation of the base design is one of the recent approaches to urban design, at whose core lies an applied attention to beauty. People conceive this type of space from a near distance and at low speeds, which naturally brings with it high degrees of attention. As a result, the explanation of aesthetic criteria in the quality of beauty in the design of local streets demands maximal public contribution in order to domesticise the concept and prevent authentic values and domestic identities from being neglected by an elitist mannerism. The present research started with explaining theories and extracting applied aesthetic criteria in five categories. It then went on to examine these on Qazvin’s Shahid Ansari Street in the city’s historic district. This was based on a survey based on observations and questionnaires. To find out how people prioritise the five criteria they were broken into 25 simple qualitative aphorisms in questionnaires, to be analysed later. Of people’s priorities 15 were found to be meaningfully high (ranked above 50%), among which attention to the quality of historic buildings came top (93.6%) followed by attention to domestic culture (85.8%) for designing the local street in question. Least important criteria were considered to be the balance between building heights (56.6%) followed by the harmony between various building components (52.2%), meaning people were feeling less connected to the latter.