Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Social aspects are one of the most important variables that ultimately affect urban design within communities. Through the last century in Egypt there has been a general trend toward unplanned spatial translation of activities and needs within urban spaces. This has led to inequitable distribution of economic resources, losing of aesthetic sense, and unrecognized community development actions. Accordingly, socio-urban design is being officially promoted as essential to the creation and development of open spaces. From this view this paper aims at: 1) Identifying and recognizing urban physical elements and social aspects in urban open spaces to be able to, 2) measure and weight quantitatively these elements\aspects impact on a selected case study “El-Messaha” square which will result in 3) forming an urban assessment tool that is socially oriented to guide designers, developers and researches while designing, developing or renovating open spaces. The study achieves its objectives by adapting qualitative and quantitative methods such as: A) social aspects and urban elements data were gathered from literature and also by conducting on site survey by researcher to identify, quantify, categorize and create a checklist that was monitored and reduced by B) establishing semi-structured interviews to track users perception for socio-urban variables with a sample size of thirty users from different ages, genders, and social backgrounds; then at last C) formative scenario analysis was the main method to transfer qualitative data to quantify the active role of socio-urban variables, impact variables, within the selected open space.