International Journal of Architecture and Urban Development
Volume:4 Issue: 4, Autumn 2014

In recent years many transformations have occurred in Iranian society and women and girls still have a lot of worries about comes to urban public spaces. Also, due to some ambiguities in defining the domain of public space in traditional Islamic cities and gaps in the knowledge related to the Kurdish cities, the main problem of this paper is how we can define a participatory approach to improvement of women’s safety in the urban public spaces of Saqqez city. This paper will examine the women’s participation role in the urban spaces safety by Participatory Urban Appraisal (PUA) model in south and north Imam Avenue, Republic Street and Quds avenue of Saqqez city.Applied methodology is based on librarian, documents and field studies. Statistical society of current research was including 200 citizens, experts and urban officials. In order to, sampling method is simple random sampling. Morgan's sample size estimation table was used to determine size of samples. Finally, Data’s were analyzed through SPSS and Excel software’s. It is presented some solve ways in the framework of SWOT strategy. Results showed that the index of city street furniture in Republic street with providing more favorable conditions of women's satisfaction with 29% of the Quds street, south Imam Khomeini street with 18% and 12% were in north Imam Khomeini street. Other indicators also had a similar situation. Finally, presented some solve ways using SWOT model.

The following study aims to present an innovative approach for Design. Participatory Design is the model of direct involvement of different social groups in the design from functional tools to environments, social institutions and businesses. Diverse collection of practices has been developed to support this direct involvement by Participatory Design. People are invited to participate during different phases of an innovative and creative process; from initial exploration to problem definition and defining the problem and creating ideas for solutions. During development, they help evaluate proposed solutions. Participatory Design answers questions about users and their tasks and goals, then help users to make decisions. Participatory Design is characterized as a maturing area of research and as an evolving practice among designer. Architecture as a professional design are social constructs and the way for humans to consider the physical world in which they exist, and as social constructs, both reflect and shape the culture in which they arise. The authors go through the definitions of Participatory Design in order to achieve a new approache in design. various values which are inherent in the social fabrics are illustrated by emphasizing on cultural identity and activity. To illustrate the concept of this approach, landscape design of bazaar in mahallat as a case study is considered.This research will attempt to identify and analyze the local participation, and goes some way to providing practical solutions to tackle the local problems, utilizing an effective application of the principles of sustainable development on both environmental and architectural aspects.

Introduction of modern architecture in Iran and its popularization in 1950s and after, brought some new concepts in everyday life of Iranian women, among which was “kitchen as heart of home-life”. Younger members of current generation are grown in these modernized spaces while a bit older ones have experienced houses of traditional style. This study is designed to explore what previous concept of kitchen was and what its effects were on current housewives imagination of it. Religious social context of city of Qom was selected as a good representative of more religious majority of social context of Iran. It was found that three ranges of meanings should be considered to explain socio-cultural concept of kitchen in Iranian Muslim women’s life: from personal space of special privacy (for females) to a living family space, from a utility space to a place of genuine life and from a sacred place to a profane one that has clear implications in Iranian Muslim women. It can be said that now ideal picture of a kitchen in this cultural context is a female personal space and at the same time it is a temporary private family space but not of collective living quality.

As cited in the constitution of the Islamic republic of Iran, it's one of the responsibilities of the government to provide appropriate housing for the people of Iran. The main aim of current study was to assess satisfaction rate of a Mehr housing residents in Fars province, southwest of Iran. Randomly selected heads of 100 households residents of Abadeh Mehr housing for at least 1 year were asked a couple of questions about characteristics of households, employment status, level of satisfaction with indexes of the present accommodation, social quality rate of the complex, urban access situation, and satisfaction about general aspects of Mehr housing. Residents were generally satisfied with the security status and accessibility to the public services of neighborhood. Most of the residents stated that their housing problem has been resolved by the Mehr housing. In contrast, poor access to city center as well as public transportation services and inappropriate cultural status were reported as the main drawbacks of the site.

Concerning the population growth and urban development, significant growth in the rate of personal car usage has caused more transportation and thus growth in occupying the street areas for parking vehicles. This has caused much transporting problems and traffic. Hence concerning the parking issue is crucial in traffic and municipal management.The important issue is the suitable place for the parking areas. If there would not be any demand for assessment and evaluation of the traffic and municipal criteria, the constructed parking area would not be much usable and cause some difficulties in transferring lines,thus the expenses paid for building the parking will be wasted.Hence, in this article, the influential indexes for parking place in three different areas of Qazvin are introduced and discussed. Regarding the qualitative municipal criteria, we have used the multi-criteria linear assignment method for comparing and considering the indexes and region, and finally rating these regions for parking.

The aim of this paper is investigating the impacts of residents empowering in physical and environmental improvements in informal settlements. This place has some problems such as safety, health and environmental that Managers and municipal authorities should take action to fix them. In this regard The NGOs as an intermediary between the people and town officials could have a significant role in solving these problems by the participation of residents."Hamyaran" private institution as a N.G.O. organization decide to implement a project with a partnership approach to empower there that called "Sustainable Development Plan in Informal Settlements”. This project is one of four design pattern in the institution which is trying to create safe and sustainable spaces with using public participation and local authorities in a decentralizing approach and an institutional development. Methodology of this research is descriptive – analytical. Objectives were questioned by questionnaire from people. Although the project for reasons such as changing in government policies and local authorities did not achieve all of goals, But succeeded in reducing crime rates in urban areas through the creation of attractive spaces, organizing urban centers and creating local institutions. The strategies employed in this neighborhood have the ability to refer to similar samples in Metropolises of Asia.

Planners have regarded understanding urban use per capita since the beginning of new thinking of urban development. This was stared with its pragmatics toward primary comprehensive urban plans and became a source for urban development plans that have tried to adapt per capita and standards with country’s conditions. Iran's Supreme Council for Planning and Architecture, determined standards per capita within the act of “explaining definitions, urban use and their per capita” in 2009. In the article, 50 cities chosen as sample in order to criticize the act of Iran's Supreme Council for Planning and Architecture on some urban per capita and surveying the amount of compatibility of cities’ status in Iran with the mentioned act. Tables of current and suggested use are extracted using the comprehensive plan of each sample and the results are compared with the act of Iran's Supreme Council for Planning and Architecture. The method is descriptive- analytic and the research is applied in nature. Their research illustrates a great variance between cities status and the standard of ratification that had approved in Iran's Supreme Council for Planning and Architecture. Revision in some factors like population, position and economical elements helps us to correct the standard in order to improve the quality of life in our cities. The results imply that the act some issues such as different climates, role and position of functions and ethnic-cultural and economic problems are disregarded.

Contemporary architecture by symbolic and visual design creates an image in the minds of tourists so that these images are then converted to urban brands. Combining symbolic monuments and modern buildings in the world today is a promising development of cities in many municipalities, municipalities and government agencies to freely and without regard to the needs of their local employs all the resources and capital to meet their local needs of foreign tourists in order to cope with the global tourism and earn easy money. This study discusses the importance of residential leisure complex architectural impact on the tourism industry tried using smooth transition regression (STR) and annual data from 1978 to 2007 time period attempts to examine the impact of a residential entertainment complex nonlinear architecture tourism infrastructure in the tourism industry. Results confirm the impact of tourism on nonlinearity residential resort complex architecture that entertainment complex architecture has resided in both the positive and significant effect on the tourism industry during the period. It should be noted that a threshold value of tourism infrastructure is set 608/20 percent. In addition, the results showed that the release rate of exchange is a significant positive effect on tourism in Iran.