Ph.D

Abstract:

Todays, efforts for achieving to flow of meaning and embedding it in space lead to simplism, imitation, and such things. Indeed, the fast life as predicated upon intensity of experience, a disposition to cram experiences into life caused dominance of the sameness and lack of content. On the other side, the speed of disembodied flows of information is frequently held to result in a permanent breakdown in the flow of meaning, that would have us living in a perpetually disjuncture. It seems that is why the emergence and continuity of place meaning is significant in response to such crisis.

In addition, effective planning for people and society, which is concerned with everyday well-being in place, must be focused on places’ inherent temporal identity and meaning.

In short, it seems that meaning as spirit of place are key factors in shaping relation of people and place, which lead to continuity of place and identity. These meanings can be embodied in persistent rhythm (time elements) of place. So, today part of cities which are context of huge changes are subject of searching for these kind of rhythm as they lead to continuity of place and meaning.

According to these and also the lack of literature about continuity of meaning also time in the domain of urban planning, in this proposal, complex interaction of processes in time and space is regarded. So, we are engaging with the embodied temporal representations in the environment and we want to know how and to what extent they are compatible with the perception of continuity. So, aiming to identify relation between urban time elements such as rhythms and continuity of meaning in places, first of all, literature on place, place meaning and continuity as one of its major principles has been reviewed. Then our position in this amount of literature has been modified in the form of conceptual framework. In the conceptual framework a new conceptual triangular model has been presented for place, which consisted of three components of space, time and human. In the proposed model, meaning of place is considered as relation between these components. In addition, concept of continuity a principle governing place meaning is placed at the middle of the model as a result of all this components and their relations. Concept of continuity has dynamics and stability in itself, simultaneously. These two are major dimension in this concept, which seems to have more related to repetition and movement in rhythms as a time element. After reviewing urban time framework, at the end of this part the relation between rhythms and continuity is regarded.  

 Memory has significant role in study of place meaning. It is the function of memory which connect time and space and result in reforming the striate time axis to a curved line through placing meanings. This is why here, authors choose qualitative method and studied lived experiences of people. Overall approach here in study of meaning is phenomenological semiotics. The techniques used in gathering data is qualitative interview around lived experiences of people and the techniques in analyzing data is interpretative phenomenology.

Finally, Results explained that stability of relations between different components of place seems to be more important than stability of components themselves in perception of continuity. Also, detailed analysis of interviews and implicated meanings revealed that relation between space and human was more persistent in memory. The focused indexes of this relation were vitality and content richness of activities. Additionally, continuity of place meaning is more around linear rhythms than cyclic ones.

Key words: place- meaning, time, continuity, rhythms, lived experience, Mashhad