Urban form

Recent increased Islamic awakening in many Muslim societies, have given a momentum to rise of contextual necessity for Islamic culture. As religion and way of life, Islam framed in city. City morphology according to Islamic ideology has brought interest to the discussion among the specialists and professionals involved in Muslim world for many decades, particularly in Iran. This goal can be achieved by experts and intellectuals and her particularity should be defined and illustrated. The present paper will attempt to synopsize and express some visions for contemporary and future urban form and architecture for Muslim cultures and societies principally for Iran. This research will try to pursue the main frameworks for the study of cultural fabrics reflecting on urban configuration, and also will delineate the qualities of spatial aspects, and make some recommendations at the end. This effort is a tentative rebirth which, it is hoped, will stimulate further discussion and research on the merits of the Islamicity.

Urban form has undergone tremendous changes throughout history. These changes have stemmed from various causes. Technology has been one of the most influential forces in changing the face of cities, leaving different marks on the city form. In fact, technology has gained an increasingly more important and integrative role in bringing changes to the urban form. In addition, recent plethora of developments and advances in various fields of technology more than before necessitates an exامینation of the relationship between technology and urban form. However, such an inquiry should be based on an understanding of the underlying philosophical and historical foundations underlying such a relationship. Throughout human history, a direct relationship has existed between the philosophical outlook on the world, the view on technology and its application, technological developments and consequently their effects on the city. The first step in understanding the relationship between technological developments and urban form changes and also in explaining the philosophical tenets, underlying urban form changes throughout history, is to realize the nature and philosophy of technology per se. The present study aims to facilitate and present such an understanding in order to broaden the horizons projecting the relationship between technology and urban form.

Desired physical form of cities has been noticeable since the beginning of urbanization, from old patterns of early civilizations to the latest urbanism’s theories, which offered to build better cities. The opinions in recent decades have expressed that compact physical form of cities is a better form than sprawl form to achieve urban sustainability. The form of the city is the embodiment of its physical form so in compact and sprawly form of city, it will be created various visual effects for the residents. In this paper, visual impacts of cities’ form, which it caused by compression of their forms, exامینed with utilizing method of content analysis of texts. For this purpose, review the comments, which presented in the form of city, proving that the more compression the city is desirable for its better form. Among these theories, we used the elements of “Lynch’s” theory for a better cognition of the city. Finally, this article shows the desirability of the compact physical form of cities for achieving better cognition of its form.

In our present research, we focus on the modeling of airflow related to natural disasters, such as sand accumulation, with urban form studies. The objective is to find which urban form can promote sand passing and reduce as much as possible stagnation of sand in the building area (streets, alleys, etc.). The urban form design will be discussed through the simulation of airflow by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). In terms of simulation, we simulated the airflow behavior, which is responsible of sand stagnation in some specific configurations. A flat ground was chosen with a first configuration, which was varied to test each time a current airflow behavior in this configuration. This modeling is made possible following an appropriate turbulence model. In this study, a correlation was made between urban wind speed and morphological parameters such as aspect ratio, building geometry and building density. According to our theoretical references, this correlation shows that urban wind speed can help reduce sand stagnation with proper values of these parameters. Therefore, through the urban form study we can promote wind speed and blow away the accumulated sand till the urban limits.