درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The center of Amman (Downtown) is one of the most marvelous sites in Jordan as it represents a wide range of heritage through time and space. However, the Downtown suffers from severe disorders in terms of negative urban development due to the cross cutting cultures between the past and present. Despite of its historical and cultural richness, several factors affected the architectural uniformity of the area. The successive cultural effect is clearly marked in the downtown of Amman. Political factors, such as the arrival of the Iraqi and Syrian refugees, significantly controlled the urban planning development in a heterogeneous way created poor and overcrowded areas of immigrants due to many residential abusive areas. Moreover, the lack of innovation and maintenance of the entire downtown area with no changes through time in addition to the lack of awareness made the downtown unable to response to various emergencies. Natural hazards threats for examples earthquakes and floods are considered as a big challenge influencing the urban, economic and cultural development process, particularly due its location in a valley surrounded by seven hills. The current study focuses on finding solutions to overcome the mufti-folds of risk surrounding the area. Recommendations are put forwards for decision makers to maintain the Amman Downtown form further degradation.

An efficient road network remains among the topical issues in the international urban development forum. This is because roads link interrelated land uses in addition to connecting them with the contiguous metropolitan areas, thus a key contributing factor for an accelerated socio-economic uplift. To sus tain this, planning s tandards that delimit urban road reserves are usually prepared and enforced through development control to ensure that roads are exclusively maintained for their intended purpose.  This s tudy, therefore, through a case s tudy was undertaken in Kisii Town, Kenya inves tigates the extent to which the unauthorized developments on urban road reserves are regulated. It was s teered by the public interes t theory of regulation by targeting residential developments which were proportionately and randomly drawn from the seven residential neighbourhoods. Data were collected using a high-resolution satellite image and a ques tionnaire. Data analysis relied on GIS, t-tes t, logis tic regression, and linear regression. Research findings demons trated a s tatis tically significant difference between the approved physical planning s tandards that are used in regulating road reserves and the extent of compliance by developers. Compliance generally declined by a mean of four metres, signifying that the County Government of Kisii did not undertake adequate development control. Non-compliance was mos tly heightened by the developers’ unawareness of the building plan approval process and that the buildings needed to be inspected during cons truction. This s tudy deepens the international debate on development control by spatially and s tatis tically illuminating how the extent of compliance with the planning s tandards that regulate road reserves may be empirically analyzed.

The brick ornamentation in Islamic architecture represents the unique skill of the architectural artists and we have seen the perfection of this kind of art during the Seljuk period. There is little information about the process of developing brick art in the architecture of Islamic mosque in Iran, and it has not yet been dealt with as it is worthy of this precious art. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out further research in this regard due to its importance in Iranian architecture. In this research, through library studies and with a descriptive-analytical approach, the trend of development of bricks ornament in the architecture of the Islamic mosques of Iran from the beginning to the end of the Ilkhan era, as well as the causes of importance and development to the bricks of the Seljuk period were studied. The brickwork decoration in the Islamic architecture of Iran gradually begins from the third century A.H. Generally speaking, the early Islamic centuries can be considered as the formation and development of brickwork ornamentation, which reaches its peak in the Seljuk era, thus the richest brick-making projects develops in this era, because during this period, artists managed to create numerous works and structures with the element due to the calm and stability of the Seljuk territory. After this period, bricklaying works continued during the Kharazmshahi era in the Khorasan area, and in the course of the Ilkhani period, its development was reduced and other techniques such as acrography and tiling were popularized.