Evaluation of the Effects of Religious Spaces on Citizen’s Behaviors with Particular Reference to the Selected Tehran Mosques

The nature of people-environment relationships is reflected in multiple research paradigms of the field, including studies of environmental stress, cognitive mapping, environmental assessment, human spatial behavior, resource conservation behaviors, and ecological psychology. The environment in which man and human life are surrounded affects human behaviors, senses, and perceptions. In this case, the built physical environment, particularly in cities is the most important part of human living spaces. These spaces can affect citizen’s life in various ways. Some of them grow out of the meaning of places, some of them are dealt with their physical features and some are concerned with the functions of the environment. Almost everywhere, urban religious spaces such as play a crucial role in human life. Need to pray and need to have an enthusiasm social life are of almost everybody’s spiritual needs. So due to meet, these essential needs, religious places have been established. In Islamic countries, mosques are of the main urban religious places, they serve as places where Muslims can get together for salat (Prayer) as well as for getting information, education, and dispute settlement. The main question of the present research is, whether attending in religious places can affect the citizens’ behavior or not? It seems that there are meaningful relations between attending in religious places and citizens’ behaviors. In order to examine the above hypothesis, two mosques (Hazrat-e Amir al-momenin Mosque and Hazrat-e Abolfazl Mosque) were selected as the case study. These mosques are located respectively in the regions 18 and 2 in the city of Tehran. Then the variables were determined and defined. There were two main variables in this paper. To evaluate the first variable (Attending in a religious place) some indexes were determined. Also, evaluate the second variable (Citizens’ behaviors) several indexes were chosen. Due to describe the variable of human behavior, the characteristics of human behavior have been divided into 2 parts, Social and individual, then to assess these features some indexes such as participation, philanthropy, self-confidence, social trust and etc, have been chosen. Then a questionnaire was prepared and data were collected. Finally, the responses were analyzed by SPSS 17. Based on the results, the hypothec of the investigation was accepted. It means that in the area under study there is a meaningful relation between attending in religious places and citizen’s behaviors.