Legibility

Human presence and accordingly establishing suitable condition for social interactions are important factors in shaping urban spaces. Caring to different aspects of improving environmental qualities especially perception aspect and ease of perception from the environment with legibility improvement is an element that was emphasized from the base of urban design. The role of time, commence of day and night and its effect on perception and legibility of the environment have not been investigated deeply. Although time effects the level and the way of perception and legibility and it should be noted that there is clear difference between human perception and space legibility during day and night.This research is looking for effective major factors on urban spaces qualities in day and night with descriptive and comparison method on the case studies and their images of Zanjan and Abadan cities and tries to approve the differences of these images. Results of performing this research clearly approving that, social, functional and perceptional dimensions are the most important dimensions of improving space quality at night. It should be declared that there are a lot of differences between the images and the perception of the city during day and night. In addition, the mention priority to urban five elements in shaping these maps are differ either.

Urban landscapes form the main parts of the city. One of these spaces is urban streets, in which social interactions and urban vitality reach its maximum quality and quantity. One of the principles and properties of urban landscape design is its intelligibility. A viewer who takes a look at an intelligible city and knows it can attract new emotional manifestations of city without damaging its original image. Orientation is also very easy for the viewer and he completely knows the environment he lives in. numerous characteristics influence the legibility of urban landscapes. The current research, which is a descriptive- analytic study, is designed to identify the factors influencing legibility of urban landscape and citizen participation as the main bases of visual preference technique. First we begin with concepts, ideas and attitudes of experts inside and outside the country about “landscape, legibility, urban streets” and identification of visual preference technique by investigating some foreign examples is done by collecting principles and characteristics to coordinate the components of city even more. Finally, considering the citizens (residents and non-residents) participation based on surveys and evaluations that have always carried thoughts and ideas about the environment, it was clarified that in different age groups, no fear should be held for the development of this technique. However, considering the new ideas of citizens, criteria are proposed to create and reinforce legible landscapes for the streets and urban landscapes.

The problem which has been the focus of city constructors and architectures since the beginning of citizenship life is the issue of the nature of environmental quality. This study, with a review of explaining paradigms of environmental quality and by reliance on basic works, has assumed the question of nature of environmental quality an interdisciplinary concept (civic construction, sociology, psychology) and is in seek of explaining perceptive quality factors from citizens' perspective. Since the nature of this study is multidimensional and understanding of its different aspects and answering of its relevant questions bounds researcher both to test present theories and to understand mental world of his or her subjects, therefore, synthetic approach has been applied for methodology of it. It should be mentioned that Delphi method has been applied so as to obtain different indices and factors of the study. To determine the unit of sampling, multiple-stage clustering sampling method has been used in a way that between 22 regions of Tehran municipality, based on their development, first 6 regions were selected and in the next stage all the local states of those 6 regions were listed and then six local states were randomly selected. Size of the sample of this study is 200 persons. The results show that most of the perceptive factors derived from qualitative section of the research conform to factors derived from quantitative section and questionnaire. In other words factors derived from qualitative section are the same as those derived from quantitative factors. The significant point to notice in this section is that some of the derived factors from this section couldn’t be categorized by previous theories but rather they belong to the research community of this study (i.e. local states of Tehran). Thus we can state that the total perceptive criteria of environmental quality of these local states are as follows: legibility, place atmosphere, permeability, peace, tranquility, liveliness, sensational rapture, time sense, civil justice, security, human standard, sociability.