An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Behavioral and Democratic Urban Spaces; Integrating the Theories

 Behavioral design of urban spaces should be considered as a democratic and human value in nowadays urban developments, in order to meet various human behaviors in a non-deterministic, impartial, and disinterested fashion. However, the inattention to democratic and behavioral values provides an intolerable problem in the process of urban design in Iran, ignoring the importance of multiple qualities and realities (social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, and even technological) of existing urban spaces. The deterministic urban projects, which is partly derived from limited and exclusionary capitalism, and also the deterrent traditional urban attitudes and personal interests in our country, literally jeopardize our urban spaces and cause them to lose their "Public and Civic" character  and essence. The urban environment, therefore, no longer accommodates a wide range of users, as well as the interactions and varied democratic behaviors associated with them, and thus the concept of “Freedom in Action and Behavior” is sorely neglected more than ever. As a result of these shortcomings, people have no incentives to take active roles in urban spaces and just do some mere necessities on the basis of this deterministic context, and, therefore, the correlation between human and city is fractured left and right. This problematical complicated situation leads to the emersion of degraded spaces with underdeveloped behavioral values and undemocratic contents. Thus, the shape and content of many of our cities (of course if we can call them cities because of the lack of articulation between “urbs” and “civitas”) are transformed into the collections of mere populations, substandard spaces, and dense soulless buildings. How beautiful Barati says “the cities of our country have become Noncity, which leads to social despair”. These statements actually shed a light on the fact that our current cities have lost their spatial, local, and humanistic features and thus people are mutually forced to reiterate repetitive and populistic behaviors. We should be aware of what is turn to a really important matter today, that the less we honor open and democratic urban societies and behavior-based spaces, the more we will face with disinterested and passive urban users.   

This study seeks to find a rational responsive framework by scrutinizing the behavioral and democratic urban theories, an anti-elitism and anti-totalitarianism framework that might comprise absent characteristics and criteria of our urbanism and can crystalize some effective solutions in the process of democratic design of behavioral urban spaces for removing the widespread deep-rooted urban dilemma, which we are facing with. Research hypothesis: the actualization of behavioral-based and democratic realities of our urban spaces (which can be called the process of democratic design of behavioral urban spaces) can lead to more people-friendly and efficient urban structures. Research

This study is conducted through content analysis and comparative methods. The analyses and descriptions are also followed by a non-interventionist approach that solely tries to systematically highlight the scattered patterns and points throughout a set of texts. The required information is also collected through the structured study of related theoretical documents. Findings and

This study partly discovers that the urban design practices should not be seen as a lever to “Radical Exercise of Power”, but as a tool for achieving “Humanistic Participatory Development”. Accordingly, there are two important issues here: “Behavioral Freedom” and “Democracy”, which have to be perceived with big “B and F” and “D”, on a grand scale, in their purest nature and most fundamental and impressive forms. In this study, therefore, an attempt is made to collect the required characteristics of behavioral urban spaces, and to extract the general criteria for democratic urban design within two environmental (i.e. responsive qualities) and social (i.e. the right to the city and public participation) dimensions, to exactly integrate them, and subsequently attain the process of democratic design of behavioral urban spaces. The realization of this process may turn our urban environments to a suitable context for the manifestation of a wide range of “Voluntary and Social” activities, vis-à-vis the “compulsory” ones. Thereby, the urban spaces will be democratically formed based on behavioral and social values; in fact, people will absolutely utilize the practical freedom to make their places more democratic based on their needs, the kind of places that can bring “Multiplicity” and “Throwntogetherness” into action.