A New Urban Methodology for Iranian Urban Studies

The significance of considering localLocal hidden voicesHidden voices in urban designUrban design projects is the central theme of this book. With the manifestation and influence of critical attacks on modernModern urban developmentsUrban developments occurring during the 1960s, there have been ongoing worldwide discussions concerning the context of living placePlace, defining the city as an image of memoryMemory and meaning (Lynch, 1960), social interaction and close social relationships (Jacobs, 1961), identityIdentity and orientation (Norberg-Schulz, 1980) amongst many other definitions, which signify the importance of the social fabricSocial fabric in making urban places. The disconnection existing between modernModern city designers and citizens seems to be the key problem in modernModern urban developmentsUrban developments. As Jane Jacobs (1961, p. 15) examined an ordinary citizen’s statement, “nobody cared what we wanted when they built this placePlace”, which illustrates this common practice. This issue of ‘sensory deprivation’, however, has ‘larger causes’ and ‘deeper historical origins’ (Sennett, 1994, p. 16). Traditional IranianIranian cities, as examples, have been influenced by modernModern urban developmentsUrban developments [A traditional city ‘simply refers to the pattern of development that human civilization has built in for millennia’ (Price, 2013, p. 1)]. In this book, along with general historical investigations, I attempt to discover this urban transformation through the involvement with ordinary citizens’ life stories and daily activities in order to design a new urban methodology for Iranian urban studies. This book, therefore, is a social study of traditional IranianIranian cities using YazdYazd as a specific case studyCase study: how people move about the city; what manner of social relationships and facilities they engage in as opposed to those they would wish to have; what their memories tell about their living places; why some people enjoy living in the older fabrics while others prefer to live in the newer fabrics; and if there exist any interconnections between these areas. In this opening chapter, I will discuss the lack of contemporary citizen’s participations in IranIran, and why YazdYazd was chosen for this study. Then, I will explain the designed methodology followed by using 'shoeShoe' as a symbol of social and urban transformations.