Research on Relationship between Environmental Qualities and Continuation of Urban Life in Public Realm

Complex situations of nowadays life lead to complexity of urban issues and change meanings of many urban places. Public realms are transformed to ways for connections between private spaces solely. High emphasis on speed, technology and time encourages human to move swiftly between private spaces. Enhancing urban life quality and social life in urban spaces are prominent challenges in urban design field and many comments are posed based on situations and different experiences in this field of research. Creation of responsible and sociable places requires application of behavioral and social science and general analysis of Environmental qualities. Literature is enriched with researches that address the importance of social aspects of urban places only based on qualitative concepts of urban design. But, in this research, keeping those qualitative concepts in mind and applying a systematic procedure, a logical relationship between environmental qualities and social aspects of urban places is researched.
Jolfa district in Isfahan-Iran is chosen as a case study. Jolfa is a part of historical fabric of Isfahan city where some of its sections, due to having strong connection with main structure of the city, benefit from current movements and consequently take economic advantages. However, rest of it lacks the above-mentioned advantages; thus, there are no active social life and interaction in a satisfactory level. Based on the final goal of this paper, on one hand, social capital as a prominent aspect of social dimensions and on the other hand, environmental qualities should be assessed in the selected district.
Social capital is one of the main factors discussed in sociology and social sciences which has recently been though as a conceptual tool in urban design field. In this study, taking into account that the improving of urban qualities and their sub-qualities as a strategy to promotion of social life of city, we try to find a logical relationship between the level of social capital and urban qualities in order to offer an urban approach of social capital and apply it as a functional tool in urban design. For evaluating the level of social capital in the selected district, After picking initial questionnaires and reviewing them in terms of clarity and straightforwardness and the capability of questions to convey the desired concept, the questionnaires were standardized according to the statistical indicators and were distributed among a certain number of people in the neighborhood (334 people in this study calculated based on Cochran relation). Analysis of the results obtained from these questionnaires was used to review the level of social capital in social nodes and paths connecting them in the studied district. After calculating the level of social capital, urban Qualities should be investigated in the selected social nodes and paths between them. In this paper, mainly focused on those qualities which are in close relation with space users’ behavioral needs, creating sociable urban spaces, improving social capital, and enhancing social interactions in urban fabrics. Walkability, security, safety, sociability, permeability, and sense of richness are environmental qualities which focused in this paper. For each of mentioned qualities, based on literature review, sub qualities are identified and a method is selected for each of sub qualities to assess in the selected district; methods like evaluate the collected questionnaires, field observation, analysis the maps of the district, and interview. Since in this paper, a logical relationship between level of environmental qualities and social capital is searched, therefore, the selected environmental qualities should be quantified and rephrased in the shape of digits. In other word, quantified scales for analyzing the sub qualities are defined. In order to compute the ultimate resultant of qualities and achieve the research goal, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique has been applied. Because of simplicity, flexibility, and simultaneous application of qualitative and quantitative criteria, AHP has been extensively utilized in urban planning and design issues. In this paper, AHP technique is applied in two stages. In first stage, weight of each sub qualities is calculated for computing the resultant of each quality; and, second, weight of each quality is calculated for computing the resultant of all selected qualities in the specified node or path. Ultimately, by this procedure environmental qualities and resultant of them, are calculated and gained in the shape of digit. In the last part of research, resultant of environmental qualities is compared with level of social capital in each node or path. The results from this study proved the existence of a direct relationship between social capital and resultant of urban qualities in Jolfa district in Isfahan city as a case study. The comparison of pair of the above-mentioned factors also indicated that the relationships between the urban qualities and social capital are nonlinear. This is because of the impact of many other factors on social capital and the complexity of the relations between them.