Sense of security in an urban-village street as a public space

Abstract

Most cities in the process of rapid development in recent decades have faced with a dramatic horizontal expansion. This will influence the villages which are located in the territorial areas of the cities. In this way some villages inhale in the cities without any alteration in their fabrics. On this score, some problems appear in urban-village fabrics where one the categories are form and function that will affect the liveability of neighbourhoods. Consequently, as a mismatch between form and function, people’s preferences in neighbourhood will decrease their desire to be present in public spaces. This will lead us to have an unsuccessful public space in an urban context. This research intends to upgrade the neighbourhood liveability by the study of sense of security which is considered as one of the liveability indicators. It is believed that improving physical and functional aspects of public spaces can extol social altitudes through increasing sense of security in urban-villages. Therefore, this research will examine the physical and functional variables in sense of security and to understand their effect on people’s presence. The research method is based on a qualitative and quantitative framework. Abkooh neighbourhood which is the remains of a previous village in Mashhad Iran has been chosen as the case study area. A descriptive study has carried out through analyses the data by a combination of content analysis as well as inferential statistics. A questionnaire was designed comprising of open and four scale questions. The social interaction is considered as dependent variable and the physical and functional aspects of security perception are regarded as independent variables. It has been termed that the most relevant variables in the context of sense of security are the projection and recession, street width and lighting under the category of visual field and the people’s presence, movement pattern, proximity to the street intersections, commerce and public facilities under the category of visual control .