Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 urban planning, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran
2 Shahid chamran university of Ahvaz Ahvaz Iran
Abstract
Highlights
The increase in urban population in the past decades has led to the development and increase of human resources, but it has also brought cultural and social challenges. This growth has gradually reduced the life quality and cities livability. The feeling of alienation is a kind of mental state arising from the city in which the citizens feel separation and lack of belonging towards themselves and the social, physical, cultural and historical environments of the city. Urban spaces and their characteristics make citizens feel alienated. One of the most important urban challenges is the feelings and emotions of citizens towards city spaces. Cities are mentally alienating. That is, the environment in which a person lives affects his sense of control over life. Alienation is the separation and distance of people from their spiritual and material world and their distance and inability to change the reality in it. Alienation means the lack of connection between the built environment and physical components with humans as a social being. Different researchers in the fields of sociology, psychology and to some extent urban planning have investigated the issue of alienation. But the problem here is that the concept of feeling of alienation in the context of the city and its physical space, as well as the explanation of the causal and background conditions that cause the formation of this feeling, at least for the urban space of Iran, have not been properly analyzed. This research seeks to find out how this feeling occurs in urban spaces, the contexts of its occurrence, and the intervening factors that cause and intensify this feeling.
Method: This research is an applied type, and the nature of the subject is such that the mixed research approach was used to investigate the causal and background conditions of the feeling of alienation in the urban space of Ahvaz. Since the research method follows the exploratory-sequential model, the qualitative model presented in the first stage of the research was confirmed in the second stage with the help of structural equation modeling. The participants in this research are people who have experience living and working in Ahvaz and are satisfied with providing these lived experiences to the researchers. The researchers have selected a sample of 30 people from among male and female citizens living in Ahvaz in a targeted manner and to the point of theoretical saturation and conceptual richness and have conducted in-depth and semi-structured interviews with them. In the quantitative part, 310 men and women in Ahvaz were randomly selected and answered the questionnaire related to the city alienation feeling. 170 of the sample were women and 140 were men. 270 of the participants had a high school diploma and all the participants in the quantitative research were married except for 30. Due to the mixed nature of the research, and the use of the data-driven theory approach followed by structural equations, interviews were used in the qualitative phase and questionnaires in the quantitative phase to collect data. directed content analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data. The causal structure of the urban space alienation is a structural equation model that can be analyzed and investigated with the help of LISREL software. In order to estimate the covariance structure, correlation between components, and causal path coefficients, maximum likelihood method was used.
Results and Discussion: Directed content analysis helped us to better understand the factors affecting the feeling of alienation in the urban space, several codes for weakening or intensifying this feeling were extracted from the interviews. The most important causal conditions affecting the urban space alienation feeling were: the city space ineffectiveness, the environment insecurity, the lack of liveliness, the city physical structures, the city inaccessibility, the city livability. The most important background conditions of urban space alienation feeling are: gender, ethnicity, tradition and culture, climate and geography, lack of space identity. Also, gender segregation, family, urban policy making, government institutions and politics were the intervention conditions that intensified the feeling of alienation in the urban space. Also, the findings showed that the increase in immigration rate, tendency to vandalism and destruction of city space, social isolation of citizens, decrease in city security, decrease in the presence of citizens in city spaces, lack of participation of citizens in city management, decrease in vitality and livability of the city, gender discrimination, Reducing people's right to the city, reducing the quality of urban life are the most important consequences of the feeling of alienation in urban spaces.
Conclusion: The most influential factors on the emergence of urban spaces alienation feeling can be seen as the inaccessibility of cities, their inefficiency, and their insecurity. Among them, the city livability and its physical structure are in the next importance level. The gender, ethnicity and culture of the citizens create backgrounds for raising this feeling in urban spaces that the city space design and of course the government's policies for city management are among the most important intervening factors in the urban spaces alienation feelings. The researcher's suggestion to the policy makers and designers of the urban space is to pay more attention to the emotional and psychological citizens and by increasing the city spaces efficiency, using the proper symbols and city graphics while increasing the accessibility of the city, and making it livable with the help of good governance and Proper management can reduce the citizens alienation feeling in urban spaces. This will increase the sense of vitality in the city, reduce immigration, reduce vandalism, and discrimination, and prevent the citizens social isolation by increasing the life quality.
Keywords
Main Subjects
احساس بیگانگی شکلگیری یک نوع وضعیت روحی برآمده از شهر است که در آن شهروندان نسبت به خود و محیطهای اجتماعی، فیزیکی، فرهنگی و تاریخی شهر احساس جدایی و عدم تعلق میکنند. فضاهای شهری و ویژگیهای آن شهروندان را دچار احساس بیگانگی میکند . این پژوهش با هدف ارائه مدل مفهومی به منظور تبیین شرایط علّی، زمینهای و مداخلهای که بر احساس بیگانگی در فضای شهری تاثیرگذار هستند انجام گرفت. در این پژوهش آمیخته (کیفی-کمی) در مرحله کیفی با 32 نفر از شهروندان اهواز تا اشباع نظری مصاحبههای عمیقی صورت گرفت و با تحلیل مضامین مدل مفهومی برای تبیین و چگونگی تاثیر شرایط بر احساس بیگانگی ارائه شد. در مرحله کمی نیز به کمک مدل یابی معادلات ساختاری، ساختار علّی احساس بیگانگی در نمونه 310 نفری از شهروندان اهواز که به صورت تصادفی طبقهای انتخاب شدند بررسی گردید. یافتههای کیفی نشان داد که ناکارآمدی فضای شهر، ناامنی، سرزنده نبودن شهر، ساختارهای بیکیفیت کالبد شهر، دسترس ناپذیری و زیست ناپذیری شهر مهمترین علتهای بروز احساس بیگانگی در شهروندان هستند، و جنسیت افراد، خانواده، قومیت و فرهنگ آنها نیز زمینه را برای بروز این احساس فراهم میکنند. دسترس ناپذیری با ضریب مسیر علّی 65/0 بیشترین تاثیر، و پس از آن ناامنی فضای شهری با ضریب 60/0 قرار دارد. زیست ناپذیری شهر با ضریب مسیر علّی 51/0 کمترین تاثیر را بر احساس بیگانگی در فضای شهری اهواز داشتند. احساس بیگانگی در فضاهای شهری به شدت از مداخلههایی مثل سیاستگذاری و قانونگذاری، طراحیهای شهری، و تفکیک جنسیتی تاثیر میپذیرد. طراحی بهینه و هوشمند شهرها با توجه به تفاوتهای فردی و جنسیتی، نمادهای قومی و فرهنگی، و البته امنیت و دسترسپذیری شهر این امکان را فراهم میکند که شهروندان در یک فضای شهری زیستپذیر احساس بیگانگی کمتری با فضای شهری و محل سکونت خود داشته باشند.
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