Assessment of urban identity through a matrix of cultural landscapes

Abstract

Identity of a given place arises from a combination of social and cultural characteristics of the related community which reincarnated in physical shapes and forms of the urban locality. Soaring growth of contemporary cities beside recent transformations of traditional urban spaces have been caused some gaps between physical features of urban environments and their cultural identities. This issue, accordingly, supports the need of special attentions to the cultural and social aspects of transforming places under a process of urban design/planning. We provide here an analysis framework with emphasis to the identity of the place from the cultural aspects of the settlement. This technique mainly concerns to identify cultural features of the urban spaces and preserve them during further urban regeneration. To this aim, representative factors of the places identity are hybridized with the characteristic elements of cultural landscape and collected as a matrix of cultural landscapes, CLs. We convinced from the analysis that it may be oversimplification if solely attention to the physical features for improving quality of urban identity whiles it is affected by some nonphysical aspects, as well.Provided matrix of CLs is also implemented for a test case. Some factors of cultural landscape are discovered and the related effects on urban identity of designing place are discussed in micro and macro scales. Analysis highlighted some tangible/intangible characteristics of the studied public urban area which have to be critically considered through further transformation of the place. Accordingly, a preliminary design of the example studying area is suggested as a green linkage space between natural area in countryside and cultural realms in central parts of Mashhad city.