Evaluating the Function of Cafes in the Reproduction of Urban Spaces Case study: Dezful City

Today, public spaces are places to spend daily life. Daily life is the same as everyday life that spends by repetitive tasks such as work, rest, commuting, shopping, etc., without excitement and according to a predictable routine. Urban spaces are as container that contains a large part of the daily life of citizens and therefore they are undoubtedly in two-way interaction with it; in the sense that they are both affected by people's daily lives and also exert influence on it. One of the main issues in the design and evaluation of urban spaces is the basic needs of users in the city. Cafes, similar as other urban spaces, are an integral part of city life. Therefore, people of the community express many of their cultural behaviors and social interactions in the space of cafes. In Iran, spaces such as cafes are considered as modern phenomena in their current form. These days, modern spaces are considered as an important part of the realm of daily life and are significant as much as the remaining spaces of the traditional city. So cafes are also among the public spaces in which daily life is formed and in which various actors are engaged in interaction and communication. Therefore, studying these places, identifying the formed spaces in it and analyzing the behavioral patterns of visitors and consumers of cafes can provide a useful understanding of various cultural, social, etc. and prepare beneficial solutions to various social issues and achieving a valid understanding of Iranian urban society.

The method of this research is qualitative and quantitative. In the qualitative part, the grounded theory and in the quantitative part, regression have been used to provide analysis and explanation of daily life in cafes. In this research, in the qualitative part, with the grounded theory method, data collection and analysis with open, axial and selective coding have been conducted. And it has continued from theoretical sampling to theoretical saturation. The sample size is specified according to the saturation rule. At least 40 people were interviewed and 210 concepts were identified. Then a questionnaire was distributed for reliability and validity. And it was distributed among the statistical population of this study that included women and men between the ages of 18 and 40 years. Then they were analyzed by using of regression coefficient.

According to the process of qualitative data analysis in three stages of open, axial and selective coding, it should be noted that in the open coding stage, 1140 markers, the initial concepts in the interviews were recorded in 69 cases, which in the next step, these concepts were categorized in the form of 14 categories and the relationship between the categories was drawn. These categories include: job creation, holistic needs and infrastructures, gaining experience, tendency towards modernism, formation of a sense of social belonging, value of the space governing the cafe, introducing modern architecture, presenting new habits and tastes, leisure, relieving mental and psychological tensions, individual and national identity, law-aversion, secularization and formation of political subjects. The results show that 5 cultural, economic, social, political and psychological factors are effective on shaping everyday life. Then, each of these factors is tested through the answers of the statistical population by a made questionnaire from the qualitative part with regression coefficient and indicate that cultural factor (6.25), economic factor (10.16), social factors (10.16), political factors (6.18), psychological factors (1.45), have the most to the least impact on the formation of everyday life in the cafes.

The present article differs from other researches in several respects. The first point in the methodological difference is that it is examined by the grounded theory method. Also, the present article investigates the creativity of actors and the emphasis on daily life and metamorphic consumption as a kind of resistance that has not been mentioned in other studies. According to the conducted studies in the background of studies in the field of urban spaces and daily life, it was determined that studies have been done in this field so far, but in the discussion of cafes as a public urban space that is a place of spending daily life, no study has been exclusively conducted. The results showed that cultural factors have a positive effect on the formation of daily life in cafes. That is, cultural factors have a positive and significant effect on the formation of daily life in cafes, in other words, the improvement of cultural factors accelerates the formation of daily life in the cafes. Explaining this finding, it can be said that now in recent decades, Iranian society has undergone various changes under the influence of global processes and trends of cultural and social change. Changes that social theorists with various concepts such as media, urbanization, technologicalization, commercialization, commodification, informatization, virtualization, digitalization, medialization and concepts of this type have described and all express a kind of social pressure. In explaining the research findings, it can be said that human activity appears objectively and independently and dominates individual. This happens both in the objective realm and in the mental one. In the objective realm, a world of objects and relations between things (the world of commodities and their movement in the market) emerges in the form of invincible powers in front of human beings as if they are producing all their power themselves. This experience is valuable in the aspect of activity and pleasure, and the purpose of this article is to understand the valuable experiences that have been weakened with the help of conventional sociological tools. Simmel believed that philosophy should pay attention to everyday events and studied daily life as an aesthetic and artistic thing. Daily life in the modern world is produced in the form of an accumulation of short moments, which may sometimes seem like a short opportunity to pause for a moment in this accelerated world, and another moment, it may appear as a remnant of that world. It can be a small place to escape from a stressful encounter.