Valiasr Street Public Space (Tehran, Iran): Transition space to place

One of the major concerns of the architectural design is what features make a place meaningful. The raised question is what features can transform space to place, to make it meaningful in terms of encouraging social interaction among strangers. Tehran as a capital city of Iran, despite of having so many parks, restaurants, coffee houses and shopping mall centers, it still misses something; Real social interaction and passion. Unfortunately, with passage of time, the passion of people to go to the parks decreased because of safety issues and therefore enjoyability has decreased. Parks became places for homeless and addicted people. On the other hand, restaurants and coffee houses in Tehran are typically designed in a way that they do not engage people in social interactions. This can be due to different design characteristics; for example, furniture is arranged in a way that does not easily provide an opportunity for individuals to have informal dialogues with one another. In addition, furniture arrangement is mostly focused on separation of spaces, meaning that they provide a private space for groups of people and do not take into account the individuals. Also, in these kind of places there are no special events to provide a foundation for connecting people with different backgrounds, cultures and thoughts. So, you can usually see individuals enjoy their privacy for relaxing by having a snack or a meal or groups of people who usually have history in between them from before. Therefore, it is unlikely to see sparks among strangers.

The focus of this study is to explore new methods and information about features that will support social interaction in public spaces in one of the significant historical streets in Tehran. Valiasr street is a tree-lined street which divides this city into eastern and western parts, which makes it one of the major paths for both pedestrians and motorists. Even though it is one of the major attractions of Tehran, lack of a decent public space is sensed. Although it has a lots of common public spaces such as parks, restaurants and cafés, as a capital city of a developing country there is a lot of room for improvement. To achieve this goal, multiple methods of gathering data such as archival information, observation, surveys and crowdsourcing of social media will be used. A part of this study relies on social science to find trends and patterns in people’s behavior. Also historical research has to be used to study the past and present state of the area to develop a design for the future.

The result of this study would be coming up with design of small scaled places with specified boundaries or furniture arrangements that will make a dynamic environment to make people pause for a few moments from their daily routines and socialize. The outcome is mostly concerned with the experience of the users. The features of the surrounding should be in a way to encourage social interactions. There are some questions that need to be answered: What kind of experience makes people enthusiastic about social interactions? What factors of place can transform passive users to active ones? How is it possible to spark something among strangers who have no previous history with each other?