Recognizing the factors affecting women’s readability of urban space (Case: Ekbatan town, Tehran)

Readability is one of the main characteristics of high-quality urban environments that allow the individual to establish a favorable relationship between the individual and the urban environment for a correct and deep understanding of the environment. When placed in a readable environment, the mental image of people in the form of cognitive maps of the environment, makes people navigate easily when moving in space and will not feel confused. Today, following modern urban planning and the emergence of modern residential complexes, due to the low quality of diversity, we see poor readability that Ekbatan town, as an example of modern urban planning, has poor readability. As gender affects perception and Environmental preference affects and among them, women constitute the largest population of the society, whose presence depends on readability and security in the environment. So the purpose of this article is to identify and create a readable urban space for women in Ekbatan and seeks to answer this question: What factors affect the readability of women from Ekbatan town and what is the distribution of factors in the town? This research has been done qualitatively and data analysis has been used for the final evaluation. This research firstly redefines the concepts of readability, mental image, cognitive map, women's perception using documentary studies and library resources, then based on the concepts extracted from the theoretical part of the research, identifying readability factors in Ekbatan town by field method and attending Town, preparation of mind maps, the questionnaire is realized, data is measured using percentage and reliability assessment is done with Spss software. Studies show that indigenous women with high residence time and well-understand, consider the town as a readable environment. They do not feel confused by their mental imagery of the town and its readability components. Factors affecting women's readability in the town are Basij Square, Sarem Hospital, and Nafisi Street, respectively, and the sections outside the residential blocks are more readable than the inner sections of the blocks.