International Journal of

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the light of the Genius Loci theory. The theory has been verified in many studies by the traditional-Islamic philosophers. Proving the closeness of these two viewpoints in extent and type of the environmental influences on disposition can open a venue for applying the theory of Genius Loci to establish a basis for environmental design in regions with Islamic and traditional cultures. This research traces the origins of this theory to the ancient Islamic philosophy. In the first step, the relationships between environmental and cultural characters are explained in four climate-dispositional patterns using Christian Norberg-Schulz’s theory of Genius Loci. The second step deals with the philosophical origins of the theory within the Islamic thoughts through four patterns. Islamic philosophers have considered the types and the extent of climate’s influences on disposition and have distinguished different faculties and behavioral affordances for various temperaments and four climates - “hot and dry”, “hot and wet”, “cold and dry” and “cold and wet”. Temperament and the hot and dry climate have shown to be suitable for the moral training of the mankind and assume the character traits of the God. The findings of the present study, the phenomenologist’s ideas concerning the character type and environmental/cultural characters in different climates, and the association of the environment and human, have over lapses with the theories of the Islamic philosophers.

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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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Urban green spaces provide a context where constant association with these spaces can result in reducing the incidence or diminishing the effect of many diseases. Different studies assessed the relationship between using urban green spaces and health benefits considering influential quantitative aspects. This research tries to look differently at this issue by connecting the urban green spaces qualitative aspects and their influence on encouraging individuals to use green spaces more frequently. For this purpose, the present study employs questionnaire-based interviews (no. 336) in two city parks in Urmia, Iran (The City Park and the Coastal Park) to collect the required information for assessing the interviewees’ physical and psychological health levels. The relationships between the hypotheses are later studied using SPSS analytical software. The results showed that relationships were found between using the parks and having better psychological health conditions, but no relationship was found between the duration of physical activity in the park and having better physiological health. The assessment of the obtained data emphasizes the importance of the park characters and features that lead people to engage with specific activities which cause certain health benefits as a result of that activity. The results highlight the importance of developing green infrastructures in today’s urban areas.