Pedestrian movement

Walking has always been the most natural, the oldest, and the most essential form of transportation and is still major form of moving, hence, it plays a vital rule in urban transportation. In fact, walking is the most important tool for seeing, being seen, observing city wide daily and social activities, discovering the values and hidden attractions in urban environment, and therefore, feeling of liveliness and being needed amongst citizens. Throughout the last three decades, due to increasing urban problems such as; environmental pollution, traffic and transportation issues, lower pedestrians’ safety against moving vehicles, jeopardizing the spiritual existence of valuable historical sites, lower visual quality of urban environments, and less social interactions. Which has created a worldwide momentum against the moving vehicles domination and diminishing of the pedestrianism. Consequently, pedestrianism and its necessities, which were ignored and forgotten urban issues, once again became one of the fundamental concerns in planning and development in urban design. This movement is called “Pedestrianism Movement”. In this research, after a discussion about the theory of pedestrianism and providing a literature review of the works done by the researchers, the acceptance criteria and characterizations of a walkable environment and the major contributing factors in strengthening or weakening of the pedestrian system will be discussed. Finally, results of several case studies in potential streets in Tehran are presented and recommendations will be provided to create a walkable environment and to accomplish the pedestrianism objectives.

This research paper lays stress on philosophies of human desire. All the human being has some psychical need in addition to physical needs. And to satisfy the psychical needs, there is a need for stimulants, more in case of exclusive pedestrian precincts. Having exclusively Pedestrian precincts/Cores in city design draws its inspiration from the fact that public zones, accessible to majority of citizens, represent zones where anything and everything, that characterizes a town, happens. They, consequently, must allow for the most varied form of behaviour from that of a child to that of old people to that of physically challenged. As a result such zones need to have Design Elements to serve their varied behavioral patterns. Designing Pedestrian precincts are different essentially because of time dimension where a longer time lag is required to experience the pedestrian friendliness of pedestrian precincts. Such external stimulants can be a moderate degree of complexity, novelty, surprise, and uncertainty attained by incorporating appropriate pedestrian friendly design elements in pedestrian layouts such as richness of architecture, landscape elements, water bodies, to sit and stroll through, and commuters’ infrastructure.In this article/paper a detailed study of abovementioned Design element, external stimulants and pedestrian friendly design elements in pedestrian layouts will be discussed in detail.