Quantification of the Enviromental Qualities (Research Approach: Environmental Psychology and Social Dimensions of Urban Design)

Creation of responsible places requires application of behavioral science and general analysis of urban issues in a systematic approach. For understanding universalization of urban system, it is important to find out the current patterns and relations between them. Great numbers of environmental qualities have been studied by researches in previous works. This research mainly focuses on those qualities which are in close relation with space users’ behavioral needs, creating sociable urban spaces, improving social capital in urban fabrics, and enhancing walk-ability. High emphasis on speed, technology and time encourages human to move swiftly between private spaces. Dominance of vehicles on various aspects of human life prevents a dynamic social interaction in public spaces. In spaces where human and his presence are not important anymore, social interactions as the prerequisite of healthy social life are not met appropriately. Seeing and being seen as well as face to face greeting take place in urban spaces. If urban spaces have attributes such as sociability affordance and continuous presence of people, these needs are met in higher levels and they will be a cornerstone for enhancing social interactions. This enhancement will result in the sense of belonging to society and social participation. The importance of human behavioral needs and social issues in the fields of environmental psychology and urban studies are undeniable. Many theories have been presented in the area of environmental psychology, creating sociable places and necessity of social theory in urban studies. Having an overall view in most of them, the ability of people attraction in urban spaces is considered. Furthermore, earlier studies have emphasized that the final goal of urban design is improving the quality of social life by having a harmonic and simultaneous consideration towards urban structure and human indicators. Urban places such as squares and streets as social ties turn the society into a real community not an aggregate of individuals. In summary, a successful urban space is a creative and impressible environment where it has much diversity and gives citizens a set of choices. In other words, places where have maximum ties with users’ behavior and also improve the sense of place for citizens, are responsible urban places. Many researchers have been and emphasized that urban designs instead of concentrating on traffic and economic issue or pure tendency toward aestheticism and urban forming should have an eye on human and his behavior. Based on the framework of researches, it is necessary to change paradigms and values in urban analysis in order to promote social interactions in urban places. Many qualitative concepts have been studied, but there is an important gap which has originated from absent of the specific tool for comparing the value of mentioned qualities. Therefore,  this research tries to present a novel approach for evaluating the urban qualities based on environmental psychology. For adapting the environmental qualities with quantitative significance, the selected qualities should be quantified and rephrased in the shape of digits. This process is justified by considering dialectic relation between qualitative and quantitative concepts. Conceptually speaking, segregating quality and quantity are logical, however, in action they should not be viewed independent from each other. The steps adopted in this paper, for quantifying each environmental quality and calculating resultant of environmental qualities in urban spaces is as follows: 1. Identifying embedded sub-qualities for each environmental quality, 2. Calculating amount of each sub-quality based on urban design techniques, 3. Calculating weight of each sub-quality by using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), 4. Calculating resultant of sub-qualities for each environmental quality based on calculated weights obtained from step number (3), 5. Calculating weight of each environmental quality based on users’ preferences, 6. Calculating resultant of environmental qualities based on calculated weights from step number (5). In step 3, by considering the types of the defined qualities and sub-qualitie, the AHP technique is applied to calculate the weight of each sub-quality. Because of simplicity, flexibility, and simultaneous application of qualitative and quantitative criteria, AHP has been extensively utilized in urban planning and design issues. In the AHP technique for calculating the weight of each sub-quality, pair wise comparison of sub-factors with respect to each criterion is accomplished upon expert’s opinion. In step 5, calculating the weight of each environmental quality instead of expert’s opinion, is done based on users’ preferences. To do that, environmental qualities were explained in questionnaires and the respondents were asked to prioritize qualities according to their preferences. By evaluating collected questionnaires, final rating of urban qualities and their weights were  achieved. Based on this approach, quantitative amount of each quality and final resultant of all qualities can be calculated. The mentioned approach has been applied in Jolfa district in Isfahan as a case study.