Explaining and Evaluating the Quality of "Spirituality" in the Urban Spaces of Isfahan

One of the challenges of today's world is the crisis of spirituality, which occurred mainly due to the focus of modernism on materialism and consumerism. In the last twenty years, the ideas of thinkers about spiritual architecture and urbanism have started. The purpose of this research is to understand the dimensions of the quality of spirituality and measure it in some urban spaces of Isfahan.

A simple review method was used to review the literature, a Delphi method and a semi-structured interview with elites and an in-depth interview with citizens were used to identify the characteristics of spiritual urban spaces. Interviews analysis with thematic analysis.

The opinions of two groups of elites and citizens in order to rank 22 selected spaces of Isfahan city based on a Likert scale were analyzed using a questionnaire and Friedman's test to rank the perception of spirituality and variance analysis has been used to compare the perception of spirituality of different groups.

The results show that the spiritual urban space is formed in a context based on religious or non-religious beliefs and each of these contexts lead to the formation of social and cultural identity in the city. Such spaces have different effects on people, which include a good relationship with God, himself, others, and nature. Also, based on the scores of two groups of professors and citizens, Jame Mosque has the highest score and Hassan Abad Bazaar has the lowest score for the level of spirituality in the urban spaces of Isfahan.