International Journal of

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Living in satisfying urban environments is important for an individual’s well-being. In order to create such environments, planners, designers, and policy makers need to understand the structures that cause residents to feel satisfied with their environments. This paper focuses on the perceived quality of urban residential environments: dwellings and neighborhoods. First, literature review was conducted to extract a list of relevant attributes of environmental quality (EQ), which in turn became the theoretical basis for the rest of this work. Next, the general research methodology, the multi-attribute evaluation of perceived quality of urban residential environments, was presented. Hierarchical multiple regression was used for data analysis. Using written questionnaire, residents in two neighborhoods of Tehran, Zafaranieh and Khaniabad were asked to evaluate their present residential situation on the various residential attributes. Due to the presence of north-south dichotomy in Tehran, researcher tried to compare perceptions of the residents of these two neighborhoods. Regressing the general satisfaction evaluations on the specific evaluations revealed a model fit which appeared to be relatively high (49%). It was concluded that next to physical attributes, psycho-social attributes and attributes of built environments are relevant attributes, and EQ may best be seen as a hierarchical multi-attribute concept. Subjective evaluations varied across two neighborhoods and results showed that older people were somewhat more satisfied with their residential environments than younger people.

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Based on a gender equity perspective and within a pluralistic civil society, women should have equal rights for presence in and use of urban open spaces. Despite this, various factors decrease their presence including inappropriate design of space, as well as socio-cultural obstacles. Since women’s major place of presence and activity has traditionally been in or near home, neighborhood open space is chosen as a relevant case study. Through a questionnaire survey of 180 subjects, 90 male and 90 female, of both marital status the criteria affecting their presence are investigated. Results show that environmental quality factors are more effective than socio-cultural factors on presence of women in urban open spaces.

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The purposeofthispaper is to examinethe impacts ofphysical contextson theefficacy oflocalmosques. The main question of thisresearchis: “What istherelationship betweenphysical context (including:number and space share per head of mosque in neighborhood, functional radius of mosque, the location of local mosque, local adjacent land uses and finally legibility and identity of local mosque in neighborhoods) and efficacy of local mosques? The research hypothesisis based on the assumption that there is a meaningful relation between physical context of mosques and their expected socio- cultural efficacyinurban neighborhoods. The method of the research has been analytical descriptive.In order to examine the hypothesis, variables “physical components of the mosquesandtheirefficacy" have been assigned. Applying“the Theory of Environmental Quality”, theindexes of each variable have been determined and applied in questionnaire to be evaluated in case studies. The data of the study wereanalyzed through SPSS software and the hypothesis was confirmed with 95% confidence level. Theresearch resultsrevealedthatphysicalcontext ofmosques can have a positive influence on their function of efficacy which consists of socialsolidarity, sense of belongingand sense of religiousaffiliationsofpeople through the five above mentioned factors.