Public Space Use: An Approach to Livability in Urmia Bazaar, Iran

The public liveliness based on how friendly an area is to walking reaches an important role for the Iranian culture, particularly when the social interaction takes place in spaces like the ‘Bazaar,’ or in the ‘Mosque.’ For the Iranian urban society, the ‘Bazaar’ is a place where the public space works as a ‘hub’ where public life occurs as a result of social and cultural interaction. A new urban proposal developed by the municipality (2010) changed the Bazaar surroundings, building a large public space. The new square interacts with the ability to move around the central area of Urmia, and it can affect the liveliness in the area, penalizing the pedestrian mobility. The study developed, on one hand, compares the soft mobility based on proportion of urban pedestrian movement determined by the grid configuration itself ‘natural movement’ as Hillier et al. (Enviro Plann B Plann Des 20(1):29–66, 1993) [17] defined, which can be related with the syntactic measure ‘integration’ (Hillier and Hanson in The social logic of space. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984) [13]. On the other hand, the paper also studies how the streets are to be passed through on all shortest routes from all spaces to all other spaces (Hillier et al. in Archit Comportement/Archit Behav 3(3):233–250, 237, 1987) [16], in the central area of Urmia, and within a predetermined distance, to analyze how the new public space increases the public liveliness on the surroundings and within the covered space (Bazaar). The study allowed to conclude how the new urban structure can affect the pedestrian mobility through public space, and the changes made on the urban configuration can affect the public space liveliness.