Sustainable Criteria Evaluation ofNeighbourhoods Through Residents’ Perceived Needs

Subject Areas : Urban Design

Rama Ghalambor Dezfooly ¹ (Ph.D., Pardis Branch, Islamic Azad University, Pardis, Iran)

Received: 2011-12-12 Accepted : 2012-09-27 Published : 2013-06-01

Keywords: Sustainability, Lifetime neighborhood, criteria, Perceived needs,

Abstract :

Following the changes in the paradigm of urban studies in recent years, sustainability has become anincreasingly important issue in the neighborhood’s planning and designing. However, this concept has originally beendeveloped for American and European neighborhoods’ planning, it could also be customized for other neighborhoods’.Additionally, in the neighborhood scale, the quality parameter factors are more sensible and understandable. Therefore,attention to use these parameters may have better results for neighborhood sustainability concept.This paper claims that if subjective indicators that customized with local context and derived from residents’ perceptionabout sustainable neighborhood are being used, significant differences between residents’ valuing on subjective criteria ofsustainability from one neighborhood to another would be found. For this claim, the paper has studied the two neighborhoodsof Tehran, as a metropolis with different socio-economic and socio-cultural diversity in its neighborhoods. The findingsshow that the resulted criteria in the neighborhoods of Tehran, in comparison to each other, have meaningful differences.