Investigating the role of sensory perceptions in the memory of urban squares using Merleau-Ponty ideas(Case study: Tajrish Square)

Introduction and purpose of the research: 

Rapid changes of cities occur without regarding the environmental and cultural status and structures that interrupt integrated memories of city dwellers besides the ignorance of physical qualities. Urban spaces are the home to communal life and social conversation or discourse in a context with components responding to the place qualities. This research is seeking to discover the quality of creating collective memory through city dwellers encounter with Tajrish square.

This essay has been chosen according to the qualitative, analytical and interpretive research approaches along with phenomenological ground of embodied sensory perceptions and from Merleau-Ponty’s point of view, and also open, axial and selective coding methods. In the current study, in-depth interviews and responses given from interviewees have been used in order to the exploration of memorable components of a place through embodied perceptions.

The embodied sensory perception, which puts special importance on the perception of a place among conscious experiences and existential status of the human being in the world, can enhance lived experience of being in the world through the sensory perceptions and its transformation within conceptual processes, and eventually, end up with the memorable semantic experience of Tajrish square in a time-based process. The perusal that seeks to qualitative perception resulted from the human existence in space, sensory and embodied perceptions, human’s experience in space, imaginations and fantasies, preconceptions and pre-assumptions, and the creation of a semantic environment with the help of human’s conceptual information.

The results show that the memorability of Tajrish square follows the interaction between the plaza and the conceptual, physical and socio-cultural indications of city dwellers. This extends by pre-reflective perceptions and so embodied consciousness occurs. Tajrish as a memorable urban plaza shows off its ability for the representation and readability of physical and identity attributes and functional roles and provides the possibility of rhetoric and memorability of a space.