Finding Main Effective Factors of Creating and Transition of Collective Memory in Urban Public Spaces, Case Study: Tehran: Tajrish Square, Baharestan Square, and Plaza City Theater

Urban public spaces are the context of creation the urban public life. In these spaces the face to face relations, political demonstrations, ceremonies and festivals can be held. Also through these social interactions some aspects of cultural and historical heritage of society can be transferred. Transmission of space to place and place making is one of the main goals of urban public spaces design. There are different and effective factors which are responsible for the transmission of space to place and place making. One of them is the ability of places to create the memories. Social relationships and human interactions give this ability to a space and connect it with their past and future experiences; therefore through this circumstance an especial phenomenon will create which is called collective memory. These collective memories, during the time, will remain in the citizens’ minds and will be converted as a part of common social identity. In spite of effective role of collective memory in quality improvement of urban places and richness of urban public spaces experiences in historic cities of Iran, there is no organized research in this subject. The main purpose of this article is defining the effective factors of formation and transmission of collective memories in public spaces through scrutinizing and analyzing the concept of collective memory in three public spaces as a case study. It should be considered that these urban spaces have different identities. In this process according to the propinquity between the meaning of place and collective memory, the main research method of this paper is to define the theoretical framework as an analytical description on the basis of phenomenology of place framework .Also the results of the theoretical framework is presented in the shape of arranged table as a model for assessing effective factors on collective memory. Also the questionnaires have been written according to that table. Tajrish Square, Baharestan Square and City Theater Plaza have considered as case studies for the context analyze method through questionnaires and observation. People who have taken part in this research as a statistic group are 50 in two types of male and female in equal ratio for each place. Moreover they contain different age groups and have been chosen from various groups of spaces’ users such as traders, district dwellers and public users. Statistical analysis of the result of questionnaires will define the scale of the effective factors which play main roles in making collective memory in each specific urban space.The result of this reserch can be argued regarding to 2 points: first, identification of the main factors as physical setting of place, meaning of place, activity and events of place are key attributes of creating collective memory. Second, identification about the importance rate of each attributes in designing will help to renovate spaces to prepare an appropriate context to create the permanent urban public life and remain that in collective mind of city dwellers. According to the tables and presented analysis of case studies, it can be discussed that the existence of three factors such as physical context, activity and events of place, and identity and meaning of place are the key attributes in creating the collective memories which can convert the places to important aspect of the national culture. In Tajrish square case study, the existence of three attributes (physical context, activity and meaning of place) is the main factor of creating the memory but in Baharestan square we can observe the existence of just two attributes (activity and meaning of place). Compared to Tajrish and Baharestan square the Plaza City Theater has less choices to absorb the users and the main factor which is effective in creating collective memory is the activity and the events of place because the group of people who come and visit that place is mostly limited to students. The result of surveys and statistical analysis show that activities and events of a place as the common attributes have had more effects in creating collective memory in each place. Therefore it is clear that the difference in factors which shape these key attributes, has led to distinctiveness between collective memories of urban public spaces.