The Interplay between Urban Densification and Place Change in Tehran; Implications for Place-Based Social Sustainability

Abstract

Recent scholarship on urban social sustainability has redirected its attention to the role of place-based theories and practices in achieving and sustaining social outcomes. The notion of place and its centrality in everyday life of urban citizens could be used as an anchor point to study urbanisation processes and rapid urban changes. This paper employs a place-based framework of urban social sustainability in parallel to a framework of ‘place transformation’ to examine the consequences of soft densification on place attachment at the neighbourhood level in Tehran, Iran. Through analysing sixteen semi-structured interviews with residents, this paper argues that the temporal element of soft densification makes it a place undermining process, eradicating individual and collective place memory through resetting the time of the place. Moreover, the findings highlighted parallel trajectories in the meanings associated to place by residents which underscore the contradiction between ‘lived space’ and ‘conceived space’. Furthermore, it was found that loss of place attachment due to urban densification commonly leads to passive modes of response such changing lifestyle and daily routines, and voluntary relocating to adapt to the new socio-spatial order.

A Study on Transformation of Housing Typology and Its Environmental and Social Effects on the Living Conditions of Residents in Planned Residential Neighborhoods of Kabul City

“…Changes in habits often reflect changes in public and private behaviors, and built environments reflect the way society lives [53]. People's perceptions of a place, their meanings attached to it, and their experiences of it are insights into how urban transformation affects citizens' lives locally [54]. The houses' changing shapes reflect the transforming socio-cultural structures of each specific era, and that transformed form of the house embodies the ideology of each era.…”