فصلنامه هنرهای زیبا - معماری و شهرسازی
سال نوزدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 58، تابستان 1393)

The main goal of the development plans is to create livable environment، better quality of life and residential satisfaction. Thus، the city managers desire to achieve this goal and plan a livable city for the people through the strategies، policies and intra-organizational programs، as well as making interaction with other influential administrations on the development of the city. As well as the urban development plans، the programs of the governmental and private organizations which somehow targeting the urban society، influence the quality of the people`s life. Quality of life can be conceptualized as an overallmeasure or as a measure based on experiences in a variety of domains، such that the greater the satisfaction withvarious life domains، including personal health، consuming، work، family and leisure، the greater the satisfactionwith life in general. Economic، subjective and social indices can all shed light on a society’s quality of life، as well as on how specific factors influence well-being. QOL consists of two distinct global concepts with underlying domains: perceived QOL andthe environmental QOL. Perceived QOL domains includessatisfaction with family life، friends، health، partner and oneself. The environmental QOL domains include satisfaction with housing، schools، health services،safety and security، roads and transport and jobs. Thus Measuring Quality of Life and analyzing the determinants of the differences in Qol between cities، neighborhoods and households is extremely important to provide inputs for policy action and to help determine priorities and actions for urban infrastructure and other interventions. Therefore، evaluating the quality of Urban life in Tehran، being affected from many factors، for instance what the city managers and governmental and public organizations done، would be very crucial and could provide a framework to make a road map for the city managers to survey the existing situation and move toward the ideal situation. The main goals of this research are as: defining the indicators and measures for surveying the quality of life and measuring the quality of life in Tehran. According to the subjective approach of the evaluation، the research method is based on the survey method which applies questionnaires to collect data. To analyze the data، various statistical methods have been applied، e. g. factor analysis and regression analysis methods. During the process of the evaluating the quality of life in Tehran، different results have been achieved. The literature review of the study results in defining the theoretical framework and conceptual model of the research، as well as documenting more than 90 quality of life indicators from the academic researches، the experiences of other cities and the research of the international organizations. In the next sections، based on localized indicators، the data from 114 quarters of Tehran has been collected through 12000 questionnaires and then analyzed by the mentioned methods. The findings of the research reveals that the quality of life in Tehran consists of 19 key factors. Specifying the areas which have to be intervened and prioritizing the interventions according to the 114 quarters of the city of Tehran are the other important findings of the research.

Most of the multi-criteria decision methods (MCDM), including Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytic Network Process (ANP), use subjective judgments for obtaining the relative importance of the decision elements of a subject matter. This has been considered as one the important limitations of the MCDMs. The F’ANP model, a hybrid factor analysis and analytic network process (F’ANP) model was first introduced by Zebardast (2013) to overcome this inherent limitation of the MCDMs in the process of obtaining the relative importance of decision elements. The proposed F’ANP model uses factor analysis (FA) to extract the underlying dimensions of the phenomenon. These identified dimensions and their primary variables are then entered into a network model in Analytic Network Process (ANP). The ANP is used to calculate the relative importance of different variables of the subject matter, taking into consideration the results obtained from FA and the possible interdependence between variables of the individual dimensions of the phenomenon. The model was first used to measure the social vulnerability as a composite index. In this paper the F’ANP model is modified to overcome one of the inherent limitations of the ANP and thus the original F’ANP as well. This is the lengthy process of computation required by the ANP. In the original F’ANP model after using factor analysis to derive the components of the subject matter and in the ANP part, pair-wise comparison matrices are constructed to obtain the relative weights of the decision elements. In this paper we show that since F’ANP uses the objective measures derived from the factor analysis method to construct the pair-wise comparison matrices in ANP in order to obtain the relative importance/weights of the decision elements, this could be directly obtained by normalizing the original vectors without a need for constructing the pair-wise comparison matrices. This process results in a relative weight computation that is robust and does not need a process of controlling the possible inconsistencies in the decision process. This enormously shortens the computation process, thus making F’ANP an easier model to use. The application of the proposed model to a real world case study show that it is a robust approach for constructing a composite index such as social vulnerability index. Its application to assess the spatial distribution of social vulnerability to earthquakes in the 117 zones of Tehran Metropolis indicates that the southern parts of the city are most socially vulnerable to earthquake hazards. The proposed F’ANP model could be utilized to study any multi-dimensional phenomenon in urban and regional planning and in any other fields of study that are multi-dimensional in nature and for their assessment several indicators are used.

The low rate of realization and the inefficiency of Urban Development Plans based on traditional comprehensive approaches during previous decades in Iran planning system, and the decision-makers attitude towards an incremental conservative and operational approach have demonstrated the necessity of thinking about changing the attitudes toward making plans, which are intended to remove the shortfalls in these two paradigms in Iran. The harmony of traditional comprehensive approaches with contextual requirements and the structure of political economic system in Iran make the immediate rejection of this approach impossible on one hand. On the other hand, the incremental sufficiency of maintaining the present situation, remedying but not developing, and requiring pluralistic consistent environments make the unilateral acceptance of this approach inappropriate, although it is closer to implementation. The main issue in question is that accepting which approach will be applicable enough now that the necessity of polishing theoretical viewpoints and planning methodology with an emphasis on contextual necessities, environmental constraints, planning issues, and the stronger link between plans and operational areas are clear. Therefore, the presented research tried in a descriptive-analytical way to answer this question of whether organizing the aforementioned theoretical errors as combinational approaches will be useful enough. The main purpose of the study is therefore denominated to test the applicability of the combinational Mixed Scanning Approach in answering particular issues related to the planning system in Iran. The achievement of this purpose is first made possible through recognizing the effective internal and external necessities and abilities in the correct operation of this approach in meta-analysis form as an important criterion for a review of research background and summarizing the available knowledge corpus. Finally and in the second step, the appropriateness of Mixed Scanning approach and fulfilling urban development planning requirements is measured according to the possibilities through comparing the necessities and facilities of Mixed Scanning approach with the requirements and issues of planning system in Iran, and elaborating on the amount of harmony between both paradigms. Measuring the requirements for urban development planning system in Iran in form of recognizing the domestic conditions, distinguishing its environmental requirements and constraints, and conforming it with the effective possibilities and requirements in correct performance of the Mixed Scanning paradigm indicate the relative ability and appropriateness for applying Mixed Scanning approach as an alternative approach in urban development planning system in Iran. The abilities of Mixed Scanning approach such as increasing the realism and the power of facing the uncertain and complex environmental conditions in the developing Iran, needing some requirements that are fewer than those required for rationalism in an environment full of difficulties in achieving or the lack of up to date information, a tendency towards pragmatic and paying attention to performance with an emphasis on the environmental characteristics of the planning system and denying the comprehensive and certain paradigm, and having a simultaneous amount of idealism and conservatism, therefore making the progress and development possible will clarify the relative appropriateness of this method in urban development planning system in Iran.

Design of the new apartment buildings in Iran, has been faced to a decline of quality of local life and an improper interaction between inside-outside of residential spaces. This interaction can be affected by the quality of in-between spaces in different scales of apartment buildings in residential developments. In-between spaces of apartment houses refer to a hierarchy of the main entrance, open spaces between buildings, entrance space of apartment building (lobby), in-between spaces of apartments in each floor, the entrance space of each apartment, and the balcony. The review of the related literature shows that, three categories of perceptual-semantic, functional-behavioral, and physical-environmental factors in a social-cultural context, determine the features of in-between spaces. In order to test the suggested theoretical model, among the defined in-between spaces, the balcony was selected as a private open space between apartments and the residential semi-public open spaces. The reason for selection of balcony was it’s importance in balance of inside-outside interaction in terms of privacy, overlook, social interaction between neighbors and an important impact on general image of the residential environments. Balcony can provide a proper or improper interaction between outside-inside based on the type of open space such as street, open space of the development or complex and other private and public surrounding buildings that apartment face to. Moreover the quality of interaction between inside-outside is affected by the type of inner space such as bedroom, living room, Kitchen, etc., connected to the balcony. The main research question is that, in different social-cultural contexts, which factors influence the quality of the balcony, and what the people expect from the balcony’s performance. Three residential apartments in Tehran were selected, representing various socio-cultural contexts, including Behjatabad apartments from higher level, Ekbatan housing development from middle level, and Amir-almomenin apartments in Parand new town representing the lower level. The research strategy was qualitative, carried out with the use of a survey questionnaire, interview with the residents and using a semantic differential technique. Statistical analyses of data have been conducted with SPSS-16. The results of research showed that, the relation of inside-outside residential spaces, as well as their link with the social status of the residents can be explained by means of the six factors within the suggested theoretical framework. Design and construction of balcony as an in-between space should provide a proper relation between the apartment’s outside-inside by means of three dimensions of suggested model. physical-environmental dimension including correct local orientation and paying attention to the construction of the balcony as an important part of the building façade; functional-behavioral dimension including multi-functionality of the balcony and its useful size in accordance to the residents’ needs; and perceptual-semantic dimension features including paying attention to outside view and observing the balcony’s beauty in combination to other elements of the façade. Moreover, in order to improve the quality of balcony, attention should be paid to secondary uses and multi-functionality of the in-between spaces in programming and design of the apartment houses.

The critique of architecture has always followed architects and those involved in this field and is in fact quite indispensable from it. Therefore before going around asking why it is so, it seems appropriate to ask ourselves the how. Conceding to the fact that the ultimate goal in the critique of architecture is to discover a specific style with which to think about architecture, the main question leading this research is where exactly does the modern Persian critique of architecture fit into the international arena of criticism? This article is a study into the historic-analytic critique in the west and their equivalent attempts in Iran and the subsequent conclusion that the critique of architecture in Iran unfortunately does not have a strong past and is suffering from a weak philosophical point of view as a result, also the traditional point of views has pushed this critique to hover between positivist critique and an descriptive one. This research is based on the qualitative researches and in order to explore the question it poses, the data came from library documents and comparative method is used in analyzing the facts found. For proving assertion of this paper, we had a look over all of the studies which have ever been done in Iran around critique of architecture. We accumulated important notions in this area and rearrange them. In next step, we would dive deep into what, literally, critique of architecture is; we used leading researcher's theories to represent tangible description of critique in architecture. Critique had a vital role in growth of modernism in west, also in architecture. It also is a controversial implication which has brought together many different notions and ideas. So for getting to know what happened, we decided to scrutinize the topography of critique in the architecture in its homeland, Western Europe. By contrast in Iran, we found critique as an imported notion in literature of architecture, like many other modern ones. It was obvious that the triangle of our framework would fulfill by position of critique in contemporary architecture of Iran. In fact, we followed critique in wider context of modernism, then in narrower one, architecture. Then we tried to mention every defect and lack of knowledge in this area in Iran. Finally, our comparative analysis would show us how the architecture of Iran has faced with critique. In a nutshell, we found critique of contemporary architecture of Iran as a vague. Architecture's critique of Iran, without any philosophical basis, is hovering between positivist critique and descriptive one; it is actually suffering from what we called philosophical schizophrenia. An illusion which has penetrated to all aspect of critique in contemporary architecture of Iran; critics in Iran think they are professional in critique while they are sank to all of possible disorders in architecture. Our studies show that researches in Iran use the ideas of descriptive critique, but they apply the principles of positivists. Maybe, this challenge lays on critical identity between social layers of Iran. We, perhaps, need to rearrange pyramid from to top, not vice versa.

Knowledge-based study of architecture comprises from understanding physical and abstract entities of architectural value, their categorization and defining semantic relationships between entities based on their specific or generic properties. In current decade advanced digital technologies of information and communication and intelligent systems tries to conceptualize phenomena and realize the semantic relationships between objects and concepts of the target domain in computer understandable languages. One of the important knowledge acquisition systems for knowledge share and reuse is Ontology. Ontology was a philosophical theory and now has new application in computer science for “specification of conceptualization (Gruber, 1993)” of different domains. Major concerns of ontologic systems is rigorous analysis of entities of a domain, their classification, and define of semantic relationship links between entities by using object oriented languages such as RDF or OWL. For design and development of an advanced ontologic knowledge acquisition system for Persian architecture we have used a tool with user friendly interface named Protégé to be able to avoid programming code of the languages such as RDF. At first we developed a terminology schema and studied different vocabularies and their meaning, by reviewing main upper level resources of dictionaries, encyclopedias of Islamic architecture or resources containing technical architectural terms. We have restored the gathered vocabularies in a terminology ontology schema mapped from General Ontology for Linguistic Descriptions (GOLD). Later we gave structure to the terminology by defining classes and subclasses mapped from upper level ontologies such as SUMO or inspired from Art and Architecture Thesaurus ®. For example a mosque in our schema is subcategory of ceremonial buildings, as a single work buildings, and subclass of the built environment. Definition, pronunciation, synonym, etymology of mosque was also provided as terminological properties. Lastly we started to model the semantic relationships in the ontology schema. We mapped the relationships from metadata standards such as Core Data Index to exclusively describe a building by defining physical properties such as names and resources (data), location, components, objects, materials, agents or abstract attributes such as activities, styles and periods, physical attributes, etc. These properties take direct values as defined properties (such as an exact name of an architect of a building) or takes instances connected to set of detailed properties (such as location instance that connect set of values such as address, world coordinates, and localities of a building). Conclusively the ontology-based knowledge acquisition system developed by this research was used to document around 50 cases of buildings in Iran using descriptive core inventories. The paper demonstrated the instantiation of the ontology by one of the most important samples of Persian architecture: The Jami Mosque of Isfahan. Finally the research envisions to open the ontology-based knowledge model developed for Persian architecture online by web application server or web framework application tools to be able to provide HTML pages for the end users from the structured knowledge in normal browsers and to enrich accessibility to data of Persian architecture by advanced abilities of the system for query and searches.

According to available documents, architects in the past were not only equipped with their"normal" knowledge of traditional architecture, but were also armed with astronomical rules; and co-operated with astrologists in designing of ancient buildings and cities. According to some records, various samples of solar considerations have been made while building fire-temples, palaces and circular cities in the Sassanid era; as it is possible to detect the time of seasons changing by sun's radiation upon definite apertures and gates at the time of sunrise and sunset. Lack of necessary information to recognize the astronomical characteristics of monuments and sites, impedes their restoration and reorganization to reach the desired results; and perhaps unconsidered repairs and manipulations, eliminate the possibility of presentation and revival of ancient astronomical architecture tradition on them. In this paper the existence of some solar-astronomical considerations in construction of ancient city of Jayy, as well as a monument known as the palace of Sarvestan has been surveyed. Although the circular city of Jayy has been lost completely, the astronomical features of its enclosure have been reconstructed within a model based on primary sources (Interpretive-Historical Research Method). Even the locations of its four gates have been determined exactly. Therefore, it has been attempted to answer one of the key questions concerning the geography of Isfahan and its borders in ancient times. In traditional view it corresponds with the so-called district of Shahrestān. According to findings of present research, however, the actual location of the ancient city of Jayy has been at the north-western side of the Buyid enclosure constructed in Isfahan whose four gates were located in the four districts of modern Isfahan called as Dardasht, Jūbārah, Pāyīn-Darvāzeh, and Darvāzeh-Now. Besides, by contemplating on the applied astronomical issues in architecture and causal thinking in architectural design the hypothesis of calendric function in the palace of Sarvestan has been explained; and to confirm the validity of hypothesis, the researcher has adopted field measurements and notes (Field Study Method) and on-site visual observation. Findings of this study demonstrate that the eastern gates and apertures of the major and minor domes of the palace of Sarvestan are being deliberately accommodated with the sunlight spot at the time of sunrise at the Equinoxes as well as the Solstices; and this explains the reason behind the 30 degrees declination of the longitudinal axis of the Sarvestan palace with respect to Magnetic North. The author has addressed some historical reports indicating specific orientation of porches (ayvāns) of palaces and gates of Iranian circular cities and these reports are implying that they have calendric and astronomical functions. At last it is suggested that the eastern and western porches of the monumental complex (erbedistān) of Kuh-e Khvājeh in Sistan [from this viewpoint that they are probably located facing the sunrise and sunset positions at the Solstices] and the eastern gate of ancient cities of Gūr, Dārābgerd and Balkh [from this aspect that it is located facing the sunrise position at winter solstice] need more considerations and field studies.

Urban sprawl has been one of the most important concerns of urban planners in recent decades, affected by a complex set of factors. Although this phenomenon can be seen in both developed and developing countries, but the causes and levels are different. Many social, economic and political factors have been expressed to explain his phenomenon by scholars. One of the factors caused urban sprawl can be governments and their policy decisions. This factor has had the largest portion in the expansion of this phenomenon in Iran in recent decades. In recent years, the government has decided to establish some new provinces, resulting in the new role for some cities to be new centers for the newly established provinces. Such decision may affect the process of intensive urban sprawl. This paper aims to answer the question of whether such changes can increase urban sprawl and what factors are the causes and effects. The city of Bojnourd, located in the north-east region of the country, has been selected as a case study. After the formation of Northern Khorasan Province in 2004, this city was selected to be the center of the newly established province. Since then, the population growth and expansion of the city was accelerated. The amount of the city sprawl was measured in two periods, 2004 and 2011. Using the literature review, and based on the comprehensive studies of Ewing, Torrens, Galster and Frenkel and Ashkenazi, 15 variables were selected in accordance with the research objectives, and possible access to related data and information. It should be noted that these variables for measuring sprawl are adjusted according to circumstances of Iran by some native researchers. The needed data of variables in 27 districts of the city in 2004, and 31 districts in 2011 were extracted. Using confirmatory factor analysis, four factors of the density, accessibility, mixed use and centrality were classified and analyzed. Comparing the results of two periods shows that in total, urban sprawl of Bojnourd increased, and both centrality and mixed-use factors have been the greatest impacts on the area sprawl in recent years. This was due to the distance of new constructions from downtown, as well as the scattered land uses occured. The survey of the effective factors on the spatial and physical structure of the city and changes in the two the period, before and after the centrality of the new province, shows several impacts. Among these impacts are intensive increase in immigration, growth of informal settlements, extension of government organizations, increase in governmental construction, resulting from the necessary provision of employees housing, the need to provide specialized services in the fields of commercial, industrial, healthcare and education. Furthermore, as a result of the change in the regional role of the city, excessive increase in land and housing values has also been the effective cause on physical development of the city after being as the capital of the province.