پديد آورندگان :
رهنما، محمد نويسنده دانشكده فني- دانشگاه شهيد باهنر كرمان Rahnema , M , محمدزاده، ندا نويسنده دانشجوي كارشناسي ارشد برنامه ريزي شهري و منطقه اي، دانشگاه بين‌المللي امام خميني قزوين Mohammadzadeh, Neda
كليدواژه :
سرمايه اجتماعي , فضاي شهري , كلان شهر مشهد , كيفيت محيطي , environmental quality , Mashhad Metropolis , SOCIAL CAPITAL , urban space , پياده راه , Walkable street
چكيده لاتين :
1. INTRODUCTION
The creation and organization of urban pedestrian walkways such as Garah Khan walkable street in Mashhad, as the second largest metropolis in Iran, is carried out with the goal of preparing public spaces for the emergence of social activities in line with the realization of ideals of a sustainable urban society. As such, visiting such spaces shows the quality of social capitals of different people, based on John Gehl’s statement about the influence of environment and its quality on human activities in urban spaces, which is a variable of environmental quality. With this assumption, this research seeks to analyze the correlation between environmental quality of walkable streets and the level of social capital of the users of these places.
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Environmental quality and social capital are two variables of this research, for which different scholars such as PPS, Pakzad, Putnum and Lee, among others, have defined different evaluation criteria.
Based on different theorist’s ideas and consistent with the goals of the study and case study’s special features, six indicators such as accessibility, uses and activities, safety and security, comfort, facilities, services and scenery were used for evaluating the environmental quality. Finally, three factors such as social network, social/civic participation and social trust were adopted to evaluate the level of social capital of the users of these places.
3. METHODOLOGY
This qualitative research was carried out in Garah Khan walkable street in Mashhad as a case study. The data was gathered through a survey by distributing questionnaires amongst 371 randomly selected subjects, which had been selected out of a total 11217 subjects in the statistical population by Cochran formula. Also, SPSS software was used for analyzing the information and the correlation between variables.
4. RESULTS & DISCUSSION
The results of the questionnaire indicate that more than 50 percent of participants are not satisfied with the criteria of quality, safety and security, but since they are content with other factors such as the quality of accessibility, uses and activities, comfort, facilities, services and scenery, the environmental quality of Garah-Khan walkable street with an average score of 3.29 on a five-point Likert scale is relatively favorable. Also, according to the results of this survey, more than 50 percent of participants had social trust, but approximately 90 percent of them had weak social network and 75 percent had never participated in social activities.
Accordingly, the individual level of social capital with an average score of 1.96 on a five-point Likert scale is fairly unfavorable.
5. CONCLUSION & SUGGESTIONS
Overall, the analysis of correlation between two variables by Spearman-correlation test in SPSS, with a significance level of 0.02 and correlation coefficient of 0.22, indicates that there is a significant and positive, yet weak relationship between these two variables.
Also, the results show that there are different levels of correlations between each indicator of environmental quality and social capital variable, so that factors such as accessibility, uses and activities, safety, security and comfort have the highest correlation with social capital. Therefore, the ease of accessibility, mixed land uses, 24-hour activities, enhanced safety and security and so on can improve the quality of street and thus social capital.
