Assessing Community Architecture Based on SCI (Case Study: Child-friendly City-BAM)

User participation in many projects, couldnt reach to important outcomes and in spite of many researches, there is a real tendency for architects to do it. One of the most important reasons for this is lack of assessing and analyzing the participatory projects. Today, usage of community architecture is broader than participatory architecture. Community architecture is a recent approach of achievements by community groups who have been effective in shaping their environment. The term community is used in different ways but two major use are more important: first is the territorial and geographical notion of community-neighborhood, town, and city. The second is relational concerned with quality of character of human relationship without reference to location. Community Architecture consider to cultural values and behavioral needs of community to improve the quality of the built environment. Different typology of participation exist through a participatory process:”self-mobilization”, “giving information”,”consultative design”,”functional participation”,”interactive participation”, “regionalism” and “interpretive participation”. Current state of the literature shows tow approaches: first: sociological approach that searching for local community functioning and second: psychological approach that focus on psychological sense of community. Sense of community (SC) factor is a useful assessing tool to find out outcomes of community participation. SC (sense of community) factors have four elements: 1-membership; 2-influence; 3-integration & fulfillment of needs; and 4-shared emotional connection. One of the participatory projects in this case, is child-friendly City of BAM. The CFC project in BAM (after destroyable earthquake 2003 in BAM, IRAN) was searching the main factors that make a city child friendly. Based on this goal, some workshops were hold at 2004 and children participated in order to form their environment. The workshops focused on community participation, using children as key planners of their own environment from city planning to design a school. in these workshops, children participated with some tools such as drawing, role playing, puzzle, workshops, behavioral mapping, etc. After 5 years later, a POE was held to assessing on the projects (dream school). The result shows little relation between children ideas and the built school. Children priorities to design their school is differ to architect priorities and the built environment is not outcome of children participation and their needs and dreams but there is a relation between SCI factors and children participation. A correlation research method shows that there is a meaningful relation between SCI factors and participation of users (children) in design process of architecture. On the other hand, existing sense of community factors (in case BAM, this is because of earthquake) among users is a necessary condition to use participatory methods in architectural design process. Studies of child friendly city project in BAM (post earthquake) shows that we can reach the proper goals of community participation in the built environment, not only by accurate participatory tools, methods and levels, but also with existence of sense of community among the users. So, today new paradigms of community participation in design process is based on SC factors and fostering sense of community among users can provide better context to reach aims of community design.