urban acupuncture

Urban spaces are the heart of any city. These spaces play a crucial role in improving citizens' quality of life, welfare, and mental health. In recent decades, there have been growing concerns among urban experts over the widespread disregard for public spaces due to the dominance of capitalism and changes in citizens' lifes tyles due to their crucial needs being ignored. Despite the considerable efforts to develop urban spaces in Iranian cities, there are s till huge gaps between proposed plans and implementation processes. Due to limited resources and execution mechanisms, it is necessary to identify such spaces based on real-world needs and prioritize them in the implementation phase. In line with this, the present s tudy seeks to develop an efficient method for identifying potential public spaces in deteriorated urban neighborhoods through participative processes, reducing the cos ts and time of projects, and increasing the effectiveness of projects employing the urban acupuncture approach. The data collection and analysis tools used in this s tudy include semi-s tructured interviews, focus group discussions, analysis of documents related to the development of the neighborhood under s tudy, space syntax analysis using Depth Map software, prioritization of indicators using AHP ques tionnaire and analyzing them in Expert Choice software, and analysis and overlaying information in ArcGIS software. The findings related to the Pamenar neighborhood in Tehran sugges t that it is practically possible to identify and prioritize the public spaces through the urban acupuncture approach by s tudying and analyzing motion flows. Finally, 13 urban spaces have been identified and prioritized in the neighborhood. 

This study investigates the potential of a novel therapeutic approach to improve informal settlements, which is a highly localized healing treatment to regenerate urban spaces. The purpose is to find out how urban acupuncture can be applied to accomplish the empowerment plans of informal settlements. The process-oriented approach of urban acupuncture creates an appropriate context for the possibility of the community participation in different stages of improving public spaces. However, the social conditions and characteristics of the residents of informal settlements create challenges and require the use of special methods in dealing with the issue of participation. The first part of the research is based on formulation of an urban acupuncture framework for improving informal settlements. The theoretical finding of this part is applied in the second part of this research, which focuses on the public spaces of an informal settlement, “Kooye Manbae Ab” in Ahvaz, a city in Iran. The results showed that urban acupuncture as a small-scale, bottom-up approach, provides motivations for residents of such neglected parts of the city. Nevertheless, a combination of different participatory techniques should be applied to encourage and motivate residents to be consciously involved in the process of upgrading their environment.