Pages: 43-52

Abstract

The attachment and belonging to the environment in the traditional neighborhood life has always contributed to a sense of responsibility in the residents relative to each other and the city and establishing social partnerships. Today, major changes have occurred in the lifestyle and social communications especially among the neighbors. This has resulted in indifference and separation of the citizens from each other and also from the events that occur within the city and the neighborhood. The increasing process of weakening social relations will eventually lead to social disconnectedness. Since the traditional neighborhoods in Iran enjoyed a built-in enclosure and hierarchy and such enclosure had a significant impact on the residents’ sense of place attachment, this question comes to mind that whether the enclosed form of a residential complex can also affect the level of the inhabitants’ sense of place attachment similar to the traditional neighborhoods? Hence, in this paper we have attempted to examine the lives of the residents of the residential complexes such as Shahrake Ekbatan and Shahrake Gharb in the Greater Tehran to come up with a clear answer to the raised question. Undoubtedly, the research result may affect the process of design and development of residential settlements in accordance with the needs of the indigenous peoples. We used the Williams & Vask questionnaire to this end. We dispensed the questionnaire with 12 benchmark questions about the extent of the sense of place attachment among 210 residents of both towns. Based on the obtained results, the inhabitants of Shahrake Ekbatan showed a higher sense of place attachment than the residents of the Shahrake Gharb. In other words, since the t-statistic is larger than the absolute value of 1.96 at 95 percent confidence level; and also since the error level is smaller than 0.05 at 95 percent confidence level; so there is a significant difference between the level of enclosure and the residents’ sense of place attachment. Therefore, the highly enclosed form of a residential complex begets a higher sense of place attachment among the residents.