The Impact of City Form on Culture: A Historical Approach

Today's cities are experiencing significant cultural changes that stem from many factors. One of them is city form (city physical aspects) that impact on people behavior and then they form their culture. In fact, the structure and appearance of today's cities are markedly different from Iranian past culture that this difference, in some cases, has had a clear impact on cultural issues. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the shape of the city influences culture over time. Culture consists of two parts: material culture and spiritual one. If we consider material things such as lifestyle, communication and intimacy, customs and generally people's activities that are tangible and visible, as material culture, the spiritual culture (studied in this research) consists of 4 factors: beliefs, norms, values and language. The research method is a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of documentary, field and survey (using questionnaire). Independent variables are city form elements such as paths, nodes, edges, landmarks and districts and dependent variables are the culture elements i.e.: beliefs, norms, values and language. This article is mainly written with a pathological approach to culture. By comparing time-consuming urban behaviors with people queries (residents of District 8 of Tehran) this was achieved that many beliefs, behaviors and vocabulary have been influenced by the city form over time. Based on field findings and interviews with urban planning experts. Finally, it was concluded that language, norms, values, and beliefs are influenced by the city form, respectively