Role of Urban Regeneration in Strengthening Community Development (Case Study: Kowsar neighborhood, Region 12 (Tehran))

Abstract

The development of social and physical aspects of cities resulted from urban population growth has had a considerable and inevitable impact on city life. The impacts include a wide range of social, economic, cultural, and physical deficiencies. Moreover, the mentioned aspects have mutual relations with one another. What really matters is the quantitative and qualitative human relationships. The warm and friendly human relationships in the urban communities have diminished and human relationships are defined in the forms of formal and work relations. This is the origin of many of the social-mental problems and it has manifested in the metropolises. Face to face interactions, sense of belonging, social relations, and so forth are the specifications of the neighborhoods. Some of the mentioned specifications are used to define the communities. However, the urbanism has failed to solve urban problems, because it has a merely physical approach to development and it ignores social and cultural problems. The world experiences as well as the domestic experiences of urbanism prove that a top-down view in the form of different maps of application, density, and so forth have failed to address the problems. The present paper intends to study Kowsar neighborhood that is one of the neighborhoods located in region 12 of Tehran municipality between Khorasan street and North Shush street. It is one of the old neighborhoods of Tehran and it had a special place in the past periods. There were high social interactions in the mentioned place, however, its social interactions decreased as a result of the entrance of residents of others cities (especially the workers) into this area, its being close to Tehran Bazaar, property wear, the change of residential units into production units, and its marginalization over time. The present paper applies analytical-descriptive method as well as Spearman’s correlation coefficient in order to express its findings and representing the best strategies in order to increase the social interactions in Kowsar neighborhood.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n3s3p43