The Place of Color in Urban Spaces

Among the visual elements, color has a special place in contemporary ur-ban life. Its interactive potentials, nevertheless, have not been realized as it should have been. The key elements of urban views, including frontages of buildings, green spaces, shop windows and shop signs, urban furniture, graffiti and the likes have always been represented with a layer of colour nowadays, with advancement of technology and a wide variety of newly-developed construction materials, taking advantage of color potentials, consistent with the cultural identity of cities, is felt more than any other time. Meanwhile, applying various visual effects of colors in urban views, reasonably, may help prevent many visual anomalies in cities and towns. The impact of color on the quality of urban spaces can be examined both visually and expressively. The present research aimed to study the effective interactive power of color in quality enhancement of urban spaces from functional, sociological, psycho-logical, aesthetic, symbolic and identity aspects. Data were collected based on library source and urban filed studies and were then described analytically.