Meaning of Urban Space between Muslims and Jews

Crisis of place, as a social crisis of meaning about space and time, is the most striking contemporary of urban problems, which embodied in urban spaces, without date, identity and relationship. Place meaning reflects people’s inner psychological landscapes, their personal issues, and their particular ways of ‘‘being-in-the world”. Relph (1976), in his influential work on place and placelessness, identifies three components of place: physical setting, activities and meanings. He argues, that of these three components, meanings are probably more difficult to grasp than the others although it is important. Architects and planners, not considering the meanings that places bring to individuals and groups, run the risk of destroying authentic places or producing inauthentic ones. The literature suggests a variety of dimensions that enhance our understanding of people’s perception of place meaning. This paper explores how place meaning is related to religion. Religion as one of the main components of person’s schemata plays an effective role in perception and meaning of urban spaces. This research at first developed a theoretical framework. Then it measured the differentiations and similarities in meaning of urban space between Muslims and Jews as well as evaluated the hypothesis of the research which is the perceived meaning of urban space between Muslims and Jews. Therefore, Joubareh neighborhood in Isfahan that has been the place of coexistence of Muslims and Jews was chosen to examine the theoretical framework. The second axis of Joubareh, between Kamal Street and Imam-Ali square with approximately 6 hectares in area, located in the northwest of Isfahan. Radial structure of the whole neighborhood has a concentric redial network of passages that each one covers the layer of Joubareh neighborhood. There are bi-axes perpendicular to this sector, which in addition to the spine, a kind of liaison between the concentric above lines. This neighborhood is adjacent to the grand mosque moreover while is the location of the coexistence of Muslims and Jews. Although now most Jews have emigrated and 95 percent of the residents of the neighborhood are Muslims, and only approximately 5 percent Jews living in the neighborhood. The research has taken place through the semantic differentiation test and in- place technique. In the semantic differentiation test, the words are used to understand the associated meanings. In such cases, the vocabulary knowledge of the respondents affects the extent of answers. To resolve this problem, this test wants the respondent to express their feelings based on the predetermined words. Usually, these words are bipolar adjectives and express dual opposite mode. Generally, to judge the opposite words, using a Likert scale is proposed. In this case the number of options should be odd to provide a neutral choice. To analysis of data, descriptive statistics (Fig. of bipolar adjectives) and inferential statistics (Man- Witney) by SPSS 19 software have been used. The results of this research show that the perceived meaning of urban spaces that can be categorized from basic level to instrumental, worthy and symbolic level, influenced by the mind of the user and urban space. The urban space is the combination of the landscape system, activity system, motion and access system, physical form system, structure of public space and environmental system. In the field research, through the combination of the systems, we found that perception of place meaning in Joubareh isn’t generally influenced by religion, but the effect of religion on the perceived meaning of single place is quite evident. The mind of the user, which in this study was used as the schemata, represents on components such as religion. We found that in second axis of Joubareh, the perceived meaning between the Jewish and Muslim is differences. Jews often perceived urban spaces, as dynamic, ugly and repetitive spaces and are interested in the Jewish community spaces, such as the space around the synagogues. Muslims feel urban spaces, as quiet, beautiful and varied spaces and are interested in parks, bazaar and etc. Although the assigned meanings have been in common as seen in the third and fourth spaces.
comparing the perceived meaning between two groups reside in Joubareh in Isfahan, we focused on the differences of the inhabitant religion that shows different perceived meaning in such as the urban spaces around the synagogues, parks and markets.