Ph.D

Mrs  Roosta Maryam will present his P.H.D thesis on " Redefining Place Indicators for Promotion of Social Sustainability in Deteriorated Urban Areas. By Iranian Islamic Approach " at 10:00 a.M on 15 June 2014 under the guidance of Dr. Esmaeil Shieh , Dr. Abdolhadi Daneshpour .

Abstract

The expansion of urban distressed areas in Iran and ignorance to “social” layers in detection of these fabrics and in provision of urban planning solutions for their improvement, clarifies the necessity for more consideration to inter-field areas of two sciences of “urban planning” and “social sciences”. One of the aspects of theoretical framework of “sustainable development”, that in the two recent decades is considered as an upstream document for preparation of urban plans, is “social sustainability” which by now is not much considered. Moreover, application of theoretical framework of “social sustainability” in order to be used at any cultural and social bed requires passing through the localization process.

This thesis is seeking to redefine and to localize a framework of place indicators of “social sustainability” to be used in Urban Recreation Plans based on cultural-social coordination of Iran with an Islamic-Iranian approach. For this, after completion of library studies, the codes related to social sustainability are extracted and the place codes effective in improvement of social sustainability were determined by help of “Content Analysis Method”. Then, the opinions of ten experts in the field of architecture and urban planning were applied in order to amend and change the indicators and determining their weight and priority by help of “Delphi” method in two steps by help of interview and questioning techniques. At last, 21 indicators extracted from this step were surveyed among the people residing in Takhti neighborhood of Tehran (as the case study) and also among the experts with the experience of working on reconstruction of urban distressed areas in order to evaluate the rate of their influences on improvement of social sustainability in urban distressed areas. Although some differences are observed among the opinion of people and experts in the rate of agreement with influence of each indicator, finally both groups distinguished 20 indicators out of the 21 existing indicators effective in improvement of social sustainability. Also, the indicators gained by help of “Factor Analysis Method” were detected under five effective factors and the model indicating the relations between these factors was compiled by use of “Path analysis and structural equation modeling”.

The most important finding of the current thesis is 20 place indicators effective in improvement of social sustainability which are categorized in five factors by help of “Factor Analysis Method”. In this way, the indicators of security, safety and frontage under the factor “security”, the indicators of accessibility, activity diversity, mixed land-use, existence of facilities and infrastructures and existence of local market and bazaar under the factors “activity acceptance”, the indicators of saving the identity, sense of belonging to place, clear subjective image and saving vernacular/local specifications and community-oriented state under the factor “identity saving”, the indicators of right of selection for people in urban spaces, existence of fair condition for different social groups and human scale under the factor “form integration” were detected as place indicators effective in improvement of social sustainability.

The model gained from this complex of factors indicates that the factor “form integration” is influencing the factors of “people-oriented state”, “activity acceptance” and “security” as an independent factor. The factor “identity saving” is affected by the factors “people-oriented state” and a “security” as a dependent factor, the factor “people-oriented state” is influencing “security” and the factor “activity acceptance” is influencing “people-oriented state” and “security”. The coefficients of each of these influences are brought in the compiled model at the thesis.

Key words: social sustainability, place indicators, recreation, distressed areas