Authenticity and the spirit of place: an approach towards making urban textures durable

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the influence of the spirit of a place on the space durability. Specifically, we consider the hypothesis that respecting the concepts of psychological and behavioral elements of a place would make the urban textures more durable. We investigate this hypothesis by performing a thorough qualitative and quantitative study. We start by studying the concept of durability and its critical role in relation to urban texture. We next examine the relationship between the spirit of a place and its durability from a phenomenological point of view. We also perform a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the existing literature to support the claimed hypothesis. We corroborate this claim by a statistical survey of the population of the Julfa neighborhood of Isfahan, Iran, followed by a quantitative analysis of the collected data.

Keywords

• sense of place
• spirit of place
• durability
• durable elegance
• urban context
• julfa neighborhood (isfahan)