International Journal of

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Nowadays, “Smart City” is a very growing and promoting concept. Unlike other concepts related to cities, like digital or green city, it encompasses all technological, human and institutional factors. However, there are too many different viewpoints and definitions of this concept in the literature. The problem statement of this research is that despite the existence of many points of view and definitions for the “smart city” concept, the management part of a particular city needs to formulate a special definition of “smartness” based on the specific characteristics, goals, priorities, policies, and constraints of that city. This paper provides urban planners and managers with an approach that helps them to determine a set of validated, customized and prioritized characteristics for the target city. These characteristics can be used to formulate a desired definition for the city, as an input for strategic planning of a smart city, a guide for aligning the main goals of a city, and a criterion for prioritizing the urban projects for a particular city. Our proposed approach consists of two phases. The first phase is based on a thorough content analysis on the significant body of the literature in order to take a valid and acceptable range of different viewpoints and characteristics of the smart city notion. The second phase relies on the characteristics resulted in the first phase and involves a specific form of validation, customization and prioritization steps for a particular city so as to determine a set of unique characteristics based on the upstream documents and stakeholders’ opinions. In order to show the applicability of the proposed approach, we present the results of applying this approach for the city of Tehran, the capital of Iran.

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In the architecture of the mosque, the light entering into the dome is a functional necessity and due to the structure, the weight of the dome and its one or more shells has caused limitations in any kind of skylights to be encumbered. The research main question is that due to the mechanism of the dome parts, how the creation and the entering of skylights to the dome were done. The research method is a combination of both quantitative and qualitative methods. Initially, based on library studies, researcher's opinions were investigated and by analyzing 14 types of mosques from the Seljuk to the Qajar era in Iran, analyzes on how to create skylights through the dome were accomplished. This research answer two essential questions which are what principles had been followed for locating skylight in the dome? Moreover, how did light enter through the dome, in one-shell and two-shell domes? The findings show that in the one-shell domes, the position of the skylight is variable. In detached two-shell domes, the skylights are placed merely in 45° areas and are not limited in terms of numbers. Conclusions state that one-shell domes had a restriction to the number of skylights, in comparison to the two-shell domes. In detached two-shell domes, lighting was possible until the 22.5° area and considering no limitations, there has been no skylight in the area between 67.5° to 90° apart from a few exceptions.

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Home personalization is a way to remedy the monotonous, standardized design of affordable housing, and to make it more congruent with users’ taste, preferences and life style. Previous research on personalized residential space suggests that private outdoor space, especially front yard, provides an ideal setting for personalization. However, most units of an affordable housing do not possess a front yard and current studies rarely give evidence of personalization in other types of private outdoor space. Therefore, the first research question is how four main types of private outdoor space including front yard, terrace, balcony, and rooftop terrace compare with respect to the extent to which each type facilitates personalization. The second question is how the physical characteristics of an outdoor open space correlate with the higher levels of personalization. One hundred and eighty private outdoor spaces of an affordable housing complex are surveyed for amount and purposes of personalization through expert inspection of trace measures and interview with residents. The data has also gone through correlational analysis. Results show that front yard and terrace are the most personalized spaces with two purposes of territorial defense and regulation of social interaction. In contrast, balcony and rooftop terrace are far less personalized, and mostly with the purpose of improving their practicality. Furthermore, larger amounts of personalization are found to be strongly correlated with adjacency to the entrance and living room, a larger size of space, and its being on the lower levels of a building.