Vernacular Cultural Landscape of Qazvin’s Traditional Gardens: A Review of Basic Conepts and Analysis of Elements and Features within the Scope of Built Environment

Cultural landscape represents different meanings such as the interaction between people and the environment, evolution through time, cultural tangible and intangible values and vernacular traditions. The term "culture" represents people’s relationship with their inhabited environment to gain a livelihood and presence of tangible or intangible values. These values are the common notion between cultural landscapes and cultural properties. This research aims to study one of the registered sites of Iran’s cultural heritage, the Qazvin’s Traditional Gardens with the cultural landscape approach; The research hypothesis is to discover common notions between cultural landscape and the Gardens such as evidences of mutual relationship between the Qazvinians and the natural environment of the region and management of water resources throughout history which will be investigated by referring to national and international documents. For example, the inhabitants as the gardeners have used the annual flood of seasonal rivers and have implemented a special irrigation system for the Gardens named floating agriculture in the submerged area once a year. The Garden trees such as pistachio, almond, apricot and grape are resistant to harsh weather and have produced precious fruits throughout history. Two major characteristics of the Gardens, that means historic continuity and vernacular characteristics can categorize them under "continuing landscape" or "vernacular historic landscape" according to the upper level classifications. The major contribution of the research is an analysis of the Garden’s features or elements according to the documents of WHC or NPS. These multifaceted features are studied specifically in three categories of natural resources, plantation, and ecological systems; built environment consisting of spatial organization, circulation paths, irrigation systems and objects and structures; and human factors and management systems of traditional gardening. These wisely interconnected features are evidences of mutual interaction between people and the environment. As a paper in the field of architecture the research has studied physical elements such as land patterns, spatial organization, structures, site furnishings and objects in more detail. Conclusively, the research shows an integrated interrelated relationship between elements of the cultural landscape of Qazvin’s Traditional Gardens. The research emphasizes on a comprehensive approach toward preservation of different interconnected built and natural elements of the Gardens and human factors to ensure a sustainable relationship between people, environment and economy of Qazvin’s city over the centuries. This work is an applied research with descriptive and analytic method of information gathering and retrieval. Its data type is qualitative.