Location of Public Places “Bazaar” as a Commercial Case and “Square” as a Social one (Case Study: Abpakhsh City)

Abstract

In spite of the fact that the need to public places for social interactions and activities is expressly felt recently, the importance of their existence in cities (studied case: Abpakhsh) has reduced or they are just found in some parts of the cities in the last decades. Attempts for solving this problem have been either descriptive or lacked consideration of geographical factors. This research is carried out to locate the public places of the Abpakhsh city by combination of Iranian-Islamic urbanizing pattern with the western pattern in order to keep the Islamic-Iranian identity of the public places with respect to the current needs of citizens. Therefore, the descriptive-analytic approach and AHP method through GIS are used in two phases. At first the per capita and the demanded lands for responding the needs of Abpakhsh citizens is measured by the 2021. Then, for better evaluation, two public places (“bazaar” as a commercial case and “square” as a social one) are located in the city with a combined Iranian-Islamic approach. The results of this evaluation in the first step show the lack of land for public places by the 2021, while the second step reveal the perfect conditions of eastern and western lands respectively for construction of a bazaar and a local square. Results generally represent the prosperous combination of the Iranian-Islamic norms with the western ones in order to maintain the Iranian-Islamic identity of Abpakhsh city without causing any obstacle for satisfying the citizen’s needs.