Journal of Researches in Islamic Architecture

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This article seeks to compare the standards of urban life quality and extracted concepts of Islamic city based on four causes of architecture. The main reason of this research is comparing what researchers mentioned as urban life quality criteria and standards and features of an Islamic city drawn by the Islamic sources. All the schools of architecture and urban designing agree that the most important goal of designing is to meet the physical and psychological needs of mankind with the highest quality. Although there is not an exact definition of quality of life that all researchers agree on, but it is possible to achieve the main standards and features by reviewing the studies that have been done about this subject. To achieve to this goal, the criteria of urban life quality from the western point of view have been studied and classified while extracting, to make it possible evaluating the features quantitatively. Besides features of Islamic utopia are studied and extracted from both religious references and ancient Islamic cases. The main issue for comparing the results is the effect of architects and urban designers' points of view and believes on urban spaces. In fact subjective cause between four causes of architecture is the main source of architectural inspiration. Therefore, the extracted criteria of life quality have been studied based on this scale and results show that, only 1% of urban life quality features are driven from this point of view. In other words just 1% of these features have been considered for meeting clients’ spiritual needs, while this ratio in Islamic city features is much bigger and it means that the role of architects and designers believes is too important in Islamic view. Believing in God's wisdom and the ::::union:::: behind the diversity that could be seen in Islamic architecture, make Islamic architects’ view more comprehensive and wiser than other designers. To sum up, Islamic utopia tries to achieve a better human being life by meeting their physical, psychological and especially spiritual needs. Shortly, it illustrates the intention of “Remembrance” in architecture and urban designing.