Sociological and Physical Analysis of Urban Public Spaces(Case Study:Tehran City )

Introduction:

 Urban public spaces are places that belong to all citizens and not just limited to the physical aspect, in fact they have been identified by the presence of people and their activities. The urban public spaces usage rate and its psychological and sociological effects on social health as one of the urban sustainable development variables has great importance among citizens. Therefore, production, distribution, accessibility and use of urban public spaces and their effects have been become an important issue in urban sociology. According to that social interactions are one of the basic needs of human beings in collective life and their civic nature, it can be confirmed that public spaces provide the basis for social interactions in the city. Also, urban public space is an essential element of urban construction, which is related to the center of social strategies and shapes people's behavior and social life. On the other hand, social and sociological factors affect the physical and appearance and design of city. Tehran city is one of the metropolises that has experienced inequality in the use of urban public spaces in recent years. A metropolis such as Tehran has various and different areas and regions in terms of physical, therefore, increasing the social and economic distance and unequal distribution of facilities and services has made it a heterogeneous city in the social environment, so it seems that analysis of public spaces in terms of the impact of social factors on the physical as an issue that needs to be raised, must be explained. Based on the subject importance, the study seeks to examine the tendency and use of public spaces in Tehran, the physical factors affecting the manner and public spaces usage rate among residents of different regions and sociological factors among them.

 Methodology:

The present study is applied and descriptive-analytical in terms of purpose and method, respectively. The method of data collection in the theoretical framework is library and documentary and in the information analysis section is to use the attitudes and opinions of citizens in the form of a questionnaire and base on the fieldwork. The statistical population of the present study is people over the age of 18 of 22 districts of Tehran in 2016 and the sample size according to Cochran's formula is 385 people. In order to explain the statistics and inferential tests and also answer the research question, the T-test was used to measure the desirability of the indicators. In view point of the study aim that is to investigate the effect of variables on each other, Pearson test and linear regression tables were also used. 

Results and discussion: 

In order to show the desirability of physical and sociological indicators of public spaces in Tehran, the T-Test was used. The results of the test indicated that the physical condition of public spaces is at moderate level of desirability and the sociological status of spaces is at low one. The Pearson test was also used to investigate the relationship between physical and sociological indicators. According to the test result, the p-value rate between the studied indicators is less than 0.05 and the sociological variables intensity of dependence to physical ones is less than the physical indicators dependence intensity to sociology ones that indicates the sociological factors susceptibility of physical factors is relatively at low level. In regression analysis, the physical and sociological factors are the independent and dependent variables, respectively. The results of this test showed that the value of the adjusted coefficient of determination is 0.421 that indicates the low ability of the independent variable to explain the variance of the dependent variable. That is to say, the independent variable explains 42% of the dependent changes, and the rest of these changes, known as the error quantification, are influenced by variables outside the model. Also, the value of the Watson camera is 1.23 that illustrated the remnants are independent of each other. The model regression value is 25.29 and the remnant value is 19.79, and due to the amount of remnant square roots are smaller than the sum of the regression square roots, it indicates that the model high explanatory power of the dependent variable changes explanation. The beta value in the model is 0.489. And the large value of beta indicates relative importance and its role in predicting the dependent variable. Therefore, the regression model is statistically significant and the research question, which is the effect of physical factors on sociological factors, is evaluated to some extent positively. 

Conclusion:

 The results demonstrate that physical factors affect a total of nearly 48% of the sociological factors changes and 62% of the effective factors in the strengthening of sociological factors in urban public spaces depend on variables outside the research. Therefore, it can be said that physical infrastructures improvement and their development in public spaces of Tehran as one of the effective factors in the production of public spaces and also accessibility and usage of these spaces and the sociological condition enhancement of public spaces do not play a decisive role. In addition to physical and sociological factors, there are other elements that need to be considered. Thus, according to different areas resident’s opinion of Tehran, physical factors have a very small effect on sociological factors in public spaces and sociological factors reinforcement in public spaces of Tehran is not only affected by physical factors and other components have more impressions. These factors may be psychological, economic, environmental, cultural, political ones and so on.