Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• parisa sherafati ¹
• Sahand Lotfi ²
• Mahsa Sholeh ³

¹ University of Shiraz

² Associate Professor, Department of Urban Planning, Faculty of Art and Architecture, Shiraz University

³ Associate Professor, Department of Urban Planning, Faculty of Art and Architecture, Shiraz University,

Abstract

This article proposes ‘urban acupuncture’ as an emerging concept in the Iranian urban planning literature. It has endeavored to explain urban acupuncture and the learned lessons learned in the urban spatial analysis process. According to the model, the best way to provide structural and infrastructural development is to employ the existing potentials of the city within a network arrangement, valuing soft approaches, like urban acupuncture, to be able to recognize thousands of diverse points in the city for small-scale but effective interventions in the form of a coherent network. Urban acupuncture as a tool with a holistic and networked view of the city identifies the abandoned points. It reintegrates them as new intervention spots into the life cycle of urban green spaces to achieve the sought urban structure. Using the "urban acupuncture" approach with a deductive-analytical methodology from a network perspective in the historical center of Shiraz, this study tries to introduce the existing potential pattern of the abandoned points in the course of moving towards urban ecological sustainability. Thus, it can achieve procedural unity by development based on existing urban environment potentials. Finally, by applying the concept of urban acupuncture, the research tries to compare the urban green network and explain the necessity of this approach by orienting the urban redevelopment to rediscovering a wide range of repressed yet developable parcels within cities as an analogical framework. As such, this process could provide opportunities for designers to intervene in the neural network through the acupuncture approach by remodeling the ecological network and structural development of green spaces to improve urban environments.

Highlights

This article proposes ‘urban acupuncture’ as an emerging concept in the Iranian urban planning literature. It has endeavored to explain urban acupuncture and the learned lessons learned in the urban spatial analysis process. According to the model, the best way to provide structural and infrastructural development is to employ the existing potentials of the city within a network arrangement, valuing soft approaches, like urban acupuncture, to be able to recognize thousands of diverse points in the city for small-scale but effective interventions in the form of a coherent network. Urban acupuncture as a tool with a holistic and networked view of the city identifies the abandoned points. It reintegrates them as new intervention spots into the life cycle of urban green spaces to achieve the sought urban structure. Using the "urban acupuncture" approach with a deductive-analytical methodology from a network perspective in the historical center of Shiraz, this study tries to introduce the existing potential pattern of the abandoned points in the course of moving towards urban ecological sustainability. Thus, it can achieve procedural unity by development based on existing urban environment potentials. Finally, by applying the concept of urban acupuncture, the research tries to compare the urban green network and explain the necessity of this approach by orienting the urban redevelopment to rediscovering a wide range of repressed yet developable parcels within cities as an analogical framework. As such, this process could provide opportunities for designers to intervene in the neural network through the acupuncture approach by remodeling the ecological network and struct

Keywords

• Urban Acupuncture
• Neural Network
• Green Network
• Shiraz Historical Urban Fabric

Main Subjects

• Urban Planning