Evaluating the Role of Urban Landscape in Citizens’ Security (Case study: Qazvin City)

Nowadays, one of the most important problems of urban areas is caused by confusion and visual disturbances. Heterogeneous structures with adjacent tissue, balconies fencing, arbitrary changing in public spaces and the building facade into warehouses and abandoned spaces and derelict, short and tall houses with shapeless windows and colored glass that are stacked next to each other with nothing in common, advertising posters and stickers to the highest elevation of the light poles and metal doors of homes, annoy the eyes. Increasing advertises disrespectful to the environment and neglected concerted practices in decorated and city beautification, turbulences in the design of the shop, and etc results in confusion and visual disturbances. Although security and urban landscape are both of the following associated branches of urban planning and landscape architecture, they may at first seem unrelated and far apart. However, several theories and experiences shows, many of the standards and the measures obtained in different studies leading to a sense of security to the citizens, direct or indirect contact with the principles used in the design of urban landscape can reduce or increase the mentioned feeling. In other words, the urban landscape should be a safe sanctuary of life of citizens. Security and urban landscape are two sub-components of the phenomenon of urbanization. In daily practice, the people should pass through the public urban environments and spaces and experience them. Thus the built environment, (that is impossible to separate it from landscape and urban landscape) should be designed and created in such a way that pedestrians and residents feel safe and secure in it. In fact, security is a concept that should be induced by such a powerful and effective tool like urban landscape in the users of urban spaces. There are different criteria in each section but what is important and decisive in the present study, are those common measures between landscape and urban security, This paper tries to extract the accurate security’s criteria which are associated with the landscape and its features to evaluate the role of urban landscape in citizens’ security and also to perform a comparison between different tissues in Qazvin as case studies. Therefore, at first with a review of the literature, urban security criteria have been extracted and those related to the urban landscape have been selected. The neighborhoods of the city of Qazvin were classified according to the old historic building. Then based on the cluster sampling a neighborhood of each tissue was selected and also some samples from each district were chosen randomly. Malek Abad is the oldest neighborhood, North Khayyam belongs to the middle tissue and Ghiath Abad is the new one. Having evaluated the neighborhoods based on model, finally, some operational strategies are offered to strengthen the role of urban landscape in citizens’ sense of security. Therefore, Analytical Hierarchy Process or AHP, as a top, efficient and appropriate model, is applied. . The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a structured technique for organizing and analyzing complex decisions, based on mathematics and psychology. It provides a comprehensive and rational framework for structuring a decision problem, for representing and quantifying its elements, for relating those elements to overall goals, and for evaluating alternative solutions. The AHP converts these evaluations to numerical values that can be processed and compared over the entire range of the problem. A numerical weight or priority is derived for each element of the hierarchy, allowing diverse and often incommensurable elements to be compared to one another in a rational and consistent way. This capability distinguishes the AHP from other decision making techniques. For data collection, questionnaires and observation has been used. To increase the precision of sampling, 130 samples were selected. On the other hand, another questionnaire was distributed among specialists and academic and professional administrative experts to determine the relative importance of criteria and indicators. The results show that urban landscape in the neighborhood of the old texture, Malek Abad, because of physical exhaustion, has a more minor role in providing a sense of security of its residents than the new neighborhood, Ghiath Abad and north Khayyam neighborhood, with a slight difference, since it is in a better condition in comparison with Ghiath Abad. However, the new one will also require more accurate attention in landscape design to achieve a more desirable level and to prevent the creation of unsafe spaces in these areas. At the end of the research, new ways to strengthen the sense of security in the new neighborhood and improvements of old ones are offered. The evaluation of the research shows that the need to pay attention to built factors and road hierarchy and environmental integrity is more necessary.