built environment

Ian McEwan’s Solar has been the subject of many a debate, mostly due to its controversial representation of climate change’s cause and the solution offered for the global disaster. The paper explores the novel’s judgment over climate change’s fountainhead and the protagonist’s vain project to save the earth. The scope of the study encompasses the narrator’s accounts of the characters and events in the story. In the light of David Harvey’s notion of ‘spatial fix,’ the study, through a close reading of the novel, focuses on the context within which the story unfolds in order to elaborate on the transformation of the earth into a globalized monolithic built environment called ‘the planet’ for the sake of efficiency and free flow of capital and commodities. It also argues that the protagonist’s solar energy generation project is a neo-liberal initiative to replace a less lucrative production mode and tackle the system’s critical spell of overaccumulation, rather than global warming.

Child labor is an inseparable phenomenon in the s tructure of developing countries and third world nations. Numerous claims have been made about the benefits of the learning environment on child labor’s life. Individuals do their activities in designed environments, which can influence them. There were few s tudies on designing an educational place for child labors, especially in Iran. The purpose of this s tudy is using an architectural approach to absorb child labors into an educational place in Iran Isfahan. After running library s tudies about child labors and the effect of place on people, in a two years, many field s tudies have been done such as: observing child labors lifes tyle, their work condition, and visiting their support centers. A total of 45 child labors between the ages of 12-18 have been interviewed, and then some results of this interview were examined on a child labors’ help center building. It confirms and completes the results of interview. Initial evidence shows that there is a gap in educational sys tem. Regular schools cannot be responsible for child labors’ needs. So, firs t, the child labor’s personal needs were discovered, then some of the architectural parameters that affect their educational achievements were introduced. The focus of architectural guidelines in this s tudy is in three parameters: well-designed physical space, sense of ownership and social support. It uses architecture to give child labors’ los t social identity back. 

We know little about the physical environment -walking relationship in middle-eas t countries. There is also a need for qualitative approaches to s tudying this relationship. This s tudy aimed to unders tand the physical contextual factors influencing the everyday walking experience of middle-aged residents in an area of Tehran, Iran. It utilized an inductive qualitative content analysis along with Cons tant Comparative Analysis (CCA). The main themes and categories explored were safety and security (sense of insecurity, sense of inadequate safety), comfort and convenience (lack of physical comfort, accessibility to des tinations and amenities, the possibility to do rhythmic walking, sense of overcrowding), and aes thetics and attractiveness (variety and harmony, cleanliness and maintenance, natural elements). The subset concepts of the categories were also explored, including lighting, presence of others, air pollution, crossing s treets, the surface of sidewalks, walking on the side of s treets roadway, thermal comfort, s tepping s tairs, noise nuisance, dis tances to the neighborhood facilities, sitting places, characteris tics of paths, overloaded s treets, non-local offices and s tores, variety and harmony of building facades, old buildings, a variety of colors, various s tores, enclosure, upkeep of buildings, greenery, presence of water and birds, and natural sounds. Narrow and uneven sidewalks influenced walking in multiple aspects. This s tudy proposed considerations and details to the general urban policies and interventions to encourage walking. The results of this s tudy can facilitate urban designers and planners in creating community built environments, which promote clean transportation and public health.

To s tudy human social behavior concerning the environment, the concepts of privacy, personal space, and territory have been s tudied by interdisciplinary experts. Examining how behavior is formed in the environment is very important in improving the environment's design with the culture of uses. Since experts in the field of architecture and urban planning need to provide real and objective solutions, they often do not have the opportunity to conduct practical research on the concepts of privacy. Identifying the formation of privacy of users can be desirable in the design of new housing. By linking the main concept and how they are in the architectural elements of different cultures, a cultural pattern appropriate to each region can be achieved. The main purpose of this s tudy is to link the main concept with the cultural and architectural perspectives. This logical reasoning s tudy used content analysis in two fields privacy and culture. For this purpose, definitions related to the privacy of collection and the method of open coding of its categories have been extracted. Then the privacy layers are extracted using social sciences and environmental psychology s tudies by summarizing qualitative content analysis. The semantic model of Rapoport's cultural meaning and privacy are combined in the research, and the main matrix of how the cultural layers of privacy are formed is drawn. Based on this matrix, the layers of social behavior can be categorized from the initial qualitative-perceptual level to quantitative-behavioral.