Explaining the Psychological Model of Liveliness Actualization in the Context of Residential Architecture

In recent decades, extensive studies have been conducted in environmental psychology, which investigates behavior considering human needs in the context of the physical environment and daily life. However, due to the lack of appropriate measure tools to apply the results in architecture, especially about housing, it has not helped much to increase the liveliness and subsequently improve the users of residential buildings' quality of life on a macro scale (society). Therefore, the question of current research is how the mechanism of the impact of architecture quality on the liveliness and improvement of residents' quality of life can be explained and how the results can be applied in practice. Thus, this study has purposefully considered the psychological concept of liveliness as one of the desirable human goals and operationally described it as a qualitative degree of the environment, using a qualitative method of meta-synthesis. Hence, an interdisciplinary systematic comprehension of the optimal design process and its resulting physical factors would be achieved, by using the principles of environmental psychology. It should meet the users' various needs to make the environment meaningful. As a result, creating positive levels of the sense of place affects the persons' feelings and behaviors, affording liveliness and high quality of life in the context of residential spaces as much as possible. In this regard, related physical factors were coded and analyzed in three macro-categories of spatial features, environmental affordances, and environmental attributes formulated in a theoretical model as an architectural strategy to realize liveliness. Moreover, the necessity, solutions, obstacles, and challenges of generalizing the results of the proposed model were discussed. Finally, it should be acknowledged that people's liveliness is significantly related to aspects of the relationship between man and his living physical environment, which can be improved by implementing the principles of environmental psychology in design.