Open spaces

This paper intends to highlight one of the key concerns of housing designers i.e. the influence of open space on human satisfaction as well as their attachment to a particular place. Consequently, neighborhood open spaces with their meaningful layout seem to be constituent elements of residential complexes. Although, architects and designers try to create qualitative areas among buildings, the function of open spaces has not fully been defined yet. As such, the current research aims not merely to elaborate on the role of open spaces, rather tries to propose designing criteria for residential complexes. Based on previous researches, the paper has investigated open space characteristics by taking into account Ekbatan residential complex in the west of Tehran metropolis, hence; proposed a model with effective variables. A survey was done after randomly selecting household samples there. Findings demonstrated the principal role of open spaces in the attachment to neighborhood. Security and quietness were the two other important criterions for those residents. Based on these findings, it can be said that the physical attributes play two roles in the neighborhood attachment; first, they facilitate social activities and provide opportunities to develop social attachment and second, enhance architectural attributes including aestheticism and density.

In urban planning, access to public spaces provides social relations for citizens. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the elderly's requirements in public spaces (case study of Sheet Bazaar, Zanjan, Iran) in order to recognize and classify their strengths and weaknesses and present more appropriate and effective strategies for their improvement. In this research, the related literature on old age and requirements of the elderly in public open spaces was reviewed and the factors affecting their use of physical places were determined at the first stage of the study. After reviewing the literature, some observations on the elderly were made and questionnaires were given to 80 users with the age of over 65 years old to serve the purpose of this study. The results of the questionnaires indicate that the frequent problems of the elderly in public open spaces were identified as follows: pollution (24.8%), pavements and roads (24.6%), traffic (14.4%), safety (12.2%), insufficiency of maintenance and management (9.6%), and socio-cultural problems (5.3%). In addition, the result of the observations in the main research area shows that the design properties had the highest and maintenance-management services had the lowest success percentages. In the end, some solutions were presented for designing new public open spaces and developing the existing spaces.