Exploring the Meaning of Quality from Urban Space Users’ Viewpoint by Analyzing Conceptual Environment Codes

Exploring the Meaning of Quality from Urban Space Users’ Viewpoint by Analyzing Conceptual Environment Codes

The main purpose of urban design is to create good and high-quality urban spaces and environments for people to live while such quality may not be determined only by imposing a structural, perceptual and value system of the designer. It can be said that human and his powers to perceive surrounding environments are the focus of urban design. Having reviewed previous researches and theories in relation to the quality of civic environments it was shown that the methods based on the people’s use of civic environments were more successful; this requires knowing the relation between the space nature, the qualities related to it and the human’s perceptual knowledge complexities and differences to read such nature. Therefore, this paper, using the knowledge scope of other sciences in the fields of psychology and communicology in relation to urban design issues, has been done in response to this theoretical demand. This study, with an interdisciplinary perspective, in order to answer this question how a high-quality and desirable urban space from the perspective of users is, has explored users’ perceptual field using grounded theory and sought the meaning of quality from the users’ viewpoint by using a psychological perception as a code; in fact, codes are informative motives and indicate the meanings defined in perceptual processes. The findings show that space users’ reading is a set of physical, functional, meaning and social layers through meaning guide codes which is more accompanied by reading of physical aspects of an environment.