Study and Analysis of the Social Flourishing Index from the Social Security Concept in the Body of Traditional Iranian Bazaars

Abstract

The sense of security is one of the necessities of urban life durability and is prominent in the context of traditional bazaars in Iran, which is traceable in correspondence with some indexes such as social integration, acceptance, justice, and finally, flourishing. Regarding the advent of a certain level of such a sense in the Kermanshah traditional bazaar, especially in terms of social flourishing, the main objective of this research is studying how it has provided a physical context affecting the sense of security with the mediatorship of social flourishing index. While exploring the sense of security and analysing the role of its associated physical factors in most of the researches has been specialized in Urbanism, it is subjected in this study within the architectural scale. Thus, this qualitative research has been performed by a descriptive-analytical method mixing two types of case study and grounded theory with a blended (social-physical) approach. The research has led to the features like spatial openness and deliberate complexity, functional diversity and legibility, and physical behavioral flexibility, as the main physical characteristics affecting the social flourishing and thus the sense of security which can be identified in the body of traditional bazaars and recreated in the contemporary regional architectural works. Therefore, the effectiveness of the relation between the physical features of collective spaces and their security can be measured by considering the index of social flourishing. This experience has been concentrated in this research concerning the Kermanshah traditional bazaar and concluded to use in future designs.