International Journal of

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Quality is the most important consequence of an urban design project, and its promotion is the final duty of an urban designer. So "urban design guidelines" which use environmental improvement factors in their structure, have an effective role in promoting urban space quality. "Urban design guidelines" are the most important instruments in urban designers' authority, to reflect and appear improvement plans in urban spaces and create the bridge between research (theoretic studies) and practice (professional efforts). The paper guidelines are generic statements that specify the goals, the design pattern for achieving them and the evidence supporting the linkage between goal and pattern. On the other hand, decisions about how to address the issue of parking are among the most important in making the city center a high-quality place for people. The city center cannot have a pedestrian orientation, a concentrated diversity of uses, or a continuity of street-level activity if parking is not well designed. Attention to varied types of existing parking in city center area (such as on-street parking, surface lots or parking structures), the main idea of this paper is to promote the quality of city center spaces, by using different urban design guidelines.

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Throughout the early and mid 1990s, there was widespread faith in the compact city model's ability to provide urban sustainability. However, where compact city policies had been implemented, follow-up studies began to show the predicted benefits did not happen as they should be. The article tries to peruse two opposite approaches of "Urban Sprawl" and "Compact City", with an analytical - critical procedure and their consistency with sustainability. It also compares sustainability strategies of the new urban design paradigms (such as New Urbanism, Transit Oriented Development (TOD) and Smart Growth) with compact city considerations. At the end, the article discusses about the question that does the compact city paradigm creates an obligatory context for sustainability? In fact, This article supports the belief that instead of concentrating on one particular solution, there is a need to recognize and accept the fact that a divers urban futures are likely to exist within a city and that urban compaction should only be seen as one way of achieving sustainable urban form. As indicated in the article ,each country should adapted the compact city considerations that best suits the local conditions and makes the best contribution to urban sustainability in a way that is both acceptable and feasible in their local environments. Because of the many challenges that the compact city concept faces, the focus should be on creating a diverse urban forms and sustainabilities that are most likely to 'fit' the area they are to be implemented in. Indeed, there should be a greater focus upon the processes, functions and design of the city and how they contribute to sustainability, rather than just the density dimension of compact city which occupied most of the literature throughout the 1990s. By concentrating on a more micro level scale, urban design can help overcome acceptability and feasibility critiques of the compact city that correctly highlight the radical cultural, political, social and institutional changes that will be required to move away from the sprawl.

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Technology has had many influences on the Iranian society in different eras. Today, information and telecommunication technologies have revolutionized the basic structures of society and a new network society has been propagated inside the traditional and semi-modern context. In countries like Iran, which are in the process of modernization, a chaos deriving from the transition period is observed that leads to a certain peculiarity. In this transition era the norms of traditional societies, which offer discipline for these societies, have been eliminated in favor of new norms that are not codified yet. The transformation to the new situation and also the confrontation with the electronic world has instigated many disorders and anomalies in the society, with its physical expression becoming visible in contemporary architecture. Today, Iranian architecture is affected by Kitsch Art and has become superficial. Using attractive visual capsules and exploiting the human habit of imitation, information viruses have spread everywhere and have changed the physical world dramatically. The propagation of networks has made this process even faster. This paper reviews the confrontation of Iranian architecture with the electronic realm and investigates the role of visual viruses in the formation of the physical fabric of Tehran. It is argued that in the future, emphasis on design supported by collective intelligence [1] and individual creativity can decrease physical anomalies in the built environment.

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Abstract: Creativity and innovation are major drivers for developments of societies and nations. In this way, research activities have an extremely significant role whose promotion is strongly dependent on the creativity and innovation. There are several factors such as the built environment, which affect the creativity and innovation. This paper extracts a set of design rules for researchers' offices in an "architecture and urban design research center", which lead to the growth of researchers' creativity and innovation. The type of plan, namely open or closed plans, and spatial aspects of researchers’ offices are investigated from the perspective of factors influencing the creativity and innovation. The spatial aspects, chosen based on the available literature, are privacy, beauty, spatial diversity/flexibility, and proximity/visibility. Additionally, four factors affecting the creativity and innovation consist of tranquility/physical comfort, motivation, creative thinking, and communication. The survey methodology, with a 26-question four-choice questionnaire, was adopted here for the sake of numerical studies. The sample group covered 91 faculty members and Ph.D. students associated with Architecture and Urban Design Departments of several universities in Tehran. The collected data has been analyzed through a statistical method, named repeated measure analysis of variance (RM-ANOVA), and the most affected creativity and innovation factors by spatial aspects are specified.

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There is abundant literature regarding virtual reality as a technology of interest in the present age. However, there are few comprehensive studies on strategies that can improve the level of urban design research using this technique. To investigate the issue, this paper first reviews the concept of virtual reality. Next, the opinions of experts in the field of virtual reality technology are summed up and key elements needed to create a virtual reality experience and key operators that establish the actual interaction of users with virtual environments are discussed. The use of Virtual Reality Modeling (VRM) in the urban design process and is also elaborated on. Uses of this technique in urban projects and advantages and limitations of its use in the field are discussed. Finally, the paper attempts to provide practical solutions and strategies to improve the quality of semi experiments developed virtual environment. This can improve the results and findings of research conducted with the technique. Strategies discussed in this article have been mostly derived from practical experience and research in recent years by the author. They can help provide a more robust analysis and reduce the errors made in the virtual environment.

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Due to the change of lifestyle and improvement of public health the number of aged people has considerably increased. Considering the relationship of the environment and people, the built environment features could exacerbate or facilitate the elderly people’s vulnerability and social needs. Recently, a large number of studies have put emphasis on the relationship between the neighborhoods’ open spaces attributes and seniors’ social needs. This study seeks to investigate the impact of the built environment indicators on the time the elderly spent in urban spaces of Banafsheh neighborhood in Mashhad. In order to do this, through a cross-sectional survey research, 33 indicators were collected from recent studies and categorized in seven main urban design qualities based on perceived and self-report data collected by questionnaire. A regression analysis revealed the impact of each quality on the sociability of the elderly. Results demonstrate that in this context, “safety” is the most effective factor on the elderly presence in open spaces. “Attractiveness” and “all age presence” are at the next points.

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The "Urban Village Approach" is one of the most appropriate ways to eliminate recent urban problems, including social,
environmental, cultural, and economic shortcomings. Although the urban village approach is generally proper to resolve these
types of flaws, its combination with the democratic concept of urban design can definitely provide more effective solutions. So
at first, this paper aims to present a theoretical combination of these two approaches in the form of recommended principles
and criteria, and then attempts to introduce a hypothetical wasteland for illustrating the practical aspects of it through design
suggestions. A major part of the achievements of this paper is based on theoretical and empirical findings obtained from
comparisons and descriptions, but in order to achieve more tangible results, the practical aspects of findings are proven by
displaying 3D designs and schemes. Consequently, these proposed principles and criteria can be utilized in designing a
democratized urban village form that finally leads to some vital qualities, such as flexibility, inclusiveness, localism, diversity,
vitality, naturality, identity, etc. These qualities, in an appropriate and consistent relation with the existing contexts, will also
bring some desired concepts within, like justice, equality, freedom, and democracy to the urban and rural areas and
neighborhoods.

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Historical fabrics are known as a national heritage and treasure which are full of spiritual and human concepts. However, we are witnessing that many of these historic districts are being forgotten, abandoned and destructed as the emotional relationship between human and its residing place is fading out. Sense of place is a concept which focuses on the emotional and internal relation between people and their environment. Sense of place consists of three dimensions, namely: place identity, place dependence and place attachment. This research is trying to identify the most significant components regarding the sense of place. It is assumed that by improving these components, a higher level of sense of place is achieved in historic fabrics. These components could also help urban designers and architects that contribute to the historic fabric of the city. Qualitative content analysis methodology was used to elicit the sense of place components from 175 studies. Screening of the systematic reviews and extraction of information on included studies was performed using a validated framework. Finally, the Delphi method is used to find the most related components of the sense of place in historic districts. The results for the physical factors show that the most important attributes are “valuable landmarks and fabric”, “form and physical characteristics”, “communal spaces and public gathering places”, and “visual harmony and unity of the facades”. The results for the set of activity factors show that experts were generally reliable in their responses. The mean value for “events in place” is 4.94, which indicates that experts perceived this attribute as the most influential determinant. Other important attributes are “social activities and interactions”, “proper roads and pathways”, “legibility and identification”, “land use and functional diversity”, and “accessibility and permeability”. In the meaning category, “vitality and happiness” is the most important attribute to evaluate the sense of place in the historical fabrics. “History and originality of the place” is then ranked second, and “aesthetic, beauty and arrangement” third. In the individual-social category, “memories and experiences of place” scored the highest followed by “cultural, religious and ritual ceremonies”, “mental imagery of the place”, and “awareness of historical values of places” (mean value of 4.24).

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This paper seeks to study the impacts of different dimensions of ICTs on urban design. Due to the inevitable digitalization of our lives which has a direct impact on urban design, it sounds that providing a redefinition of the concept of urban design is necessary. Although there are various studies about the impacts of ICTs on dimensions of cities, in this study, we consider the concept of urban design specifically. After reviewing various key aspects in urban design which were highlighted by practitioners and writers, eight dimensions were chosen to be investigated. These metrics include morphological, perceptual, social, visual, functional, temporal, environmental, and economic dimensions. We try to address digitalization in the sense that how urban design can help to bridge the science and process of urban design by investigating the impact of ICTs on a few key selected dimensions. This study aims to present a clear and compatible image of urban design in the digital era. The resulting changes from globalization are expected to update the process of urban design. The study presents a qualitative perception of the imperative-analytical technique through a content review and qualitative coding (open, axial, and selective coding) in the first part. We tried to assess the views in chronological order in an urban context to present an updated definition of urban design: urban design is a process of enhancing the qualities of urban environments which would be facilitated by using ICTs tools.

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One of the main goals of the resilient discourse in the recent urban design literature has been creating resilient places. Urban resilience is defined by the URFs (urban resilience features) for operation and realization in various fields. Due to continuous urban developments, there is a need to revise URFs with a place-based approach. URFs addressed in literature are so diverse that placing them into one single general list creates many contradictions and ambiguities. To reduce or eliminate inconsistencies in the definition of URFs and the qualitative performance of each URF in delivering urban resilience, this paper justifies the key factors for ordering and classifying URFs. In this study, a systematic review of the literature on urban resilience was performed in five stages using the Scopus databases within the 1973-February 2020 period. Then, 16 URFs, using three guidelines based on the corresponding evaluation of place and resilience, were identified and classified into three groups: (1) the intrinsic (internal) characteristics of the constituent components of a resilient system, (2) the behavioral proxies (proactive/reactive) of a resilient system and (3) the resilience-reinforcing attributes of a system in relation to the external environment. This study can shed light on the proper definition of urban resilience and its operational URFs.

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