Assessing the Effects of Different Urban Forms on Social Sustainability: The Case of Tehran

Abstract

One of the main functions of cities is to facilitate the participation of citizens in urban life through the use of urban spaces. Many urban areas lack the acceptable conditions for most urban behaviors and in general urban sustainability and sociability around the world. The concept of sustainable neighborhoods is one of the key factors in developed cities toward achieving sustainable development. Sustainable neighborhoods are related to different physical and social factors of the neighborhoods, which should have been investigated carefully. Although sustainability’s three main aspects are economic, social, and environmental, we have sought to focus our attention on the social aspect and examine how it is affected by various typologies of urban form. This work analyzes the physical and social organizations in neighborhoods and proposes patterns of social aspects of sustainability. It is based on models in the city of Tehran, Iran. Three neighborhoods representing the wide diversity of social sustainability and urban from among 22 neighborhoods were selected. This selection was made based on a GIS analysis which provided a North-South corridor containing enough diversity to model the whole city. From this corridor, we selected these three neighborhoods based on the Delphi method and systematic sampling. Applying the Delphi method to our model, neighborhoods with similar characteristics were removed and using three were chosen to represent the diversity of organic, planned, and mixed neighborhoods. In order to ensure a comprehensive understanding of both social aspects of sustainability and urban form for each neighborhood, field studies and the data collected from our questionnaire were combined. Field studies relied primarily on the expertise of the urban planner, while the questionnaire involved asking the residents, workers as well as the visitors a set of pre-designed questions covering a range of social factors. Subsequently, factor analysis was used to analyze the data gathered from the three neighborhoods. A basic general model indicating the relationship between urban form and social aspect of sustainably was derived. The general model was run in the three typologies, resulting in three distinct models for each typology, each model included a unique relationship between urban form factors and factors affecting social aspects of sustainability. The insights of this article in the relationship between social aspect of sustainability and urban form can enable the planner, through a collaborative scheme with users, to increase social aspect of sustainability by modifying urban form factors in neighborhoods with different typologies in the city of Tehran. The same process conducted here can be applied in any other city in the world, although the models would be different depending on the area’s culture, context, and socioeconomic status.