A New Reading of Sociable Public Spaces: The Nexus between Urban Design and Microsociology

Abstract

Over the past 50 years, while the development of intermediate texture of Tehran has focused on spatial dimension and physical structure, neglecting the user experience and social dimensions has become a design challenge. This paper has focused on Social interaction in public space neighborhood via integration of social and spatial dimensions which is essential more than ever. In this paper, a research has conducted through a literature review of theoretical and experimental researches in urban design and micro-sociological researchers. The aim of this paper is to develop a new perspective for reading sociability in public spaces. For reading contemporary social spaces, this article implements the combination of two observation methods to achieve better understanding regarding sociability of the public spaces. Firstly, Direct and walk-by observation tools have been used for creating behavioral map to better understand of the relationship between the temporal and spatial forms of social settings and secondly participant observation tools have been used. For being among the participants and identify the expression of their feelings and emotions, we used informal interviews and listened to their narratives and stories. The selected case is a neighborhood that has been developed in the intermediate texture of the city, “Koy-e-Nasr", commonly known as “Geisha", in Tehran, Iran. Although these spaces have no significant physical features, they are more popular for including the general interest of people. The findings offer new insight on what commonly have considered about the use of public spaces and illustrate the places and their locations such as streets edges and frontages, entrances and urban equipment, and variety of active and lingering or fleeting and passive social interactions and conditions.