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City Know-hows
The book “How to Study Public Life” by Gehl and Svarre is the core of this study. Tehran’s public life during the pandemic and after that was thoroughly reviewed and analyzed through Gehl and Svarre’s lens.
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Target audience
Urban planners; urban designers; policymakers; municipalities; city planners, public health officials, and community leaders.
The problem
The importance of the methods used by Gehl and Svarre is fading away. Simultaneously, there was an obvious lack of deep understanding of public life in Tehran during the pandemic and post-pandemic.
What we did and why
We linked the gaps in understanding of public life in Tehran during the pandemic and post-pandemic using the analytics methods used by Gehl and Svarre. As such, we employed Behavioral Counting, Travel Mapping, Photography, and Field Diaries to address Gehl and Svarre’s primary inquiry: How many? Who? Where? What? How long? These were used in 7 popular urban public spaces which were hot spots for Tehrani citizens.
Our study’s contribution
Our work shows the suitability of using Gehl and Svarre methods even during unexpected situations like the pandemic to study public life. Furthermore, the results provide a comprehensive view of public life in Tehran which has not been done before. This study shows the importance of plazas and urban green spaces during the pandemic for maintaining the public life and people’s physical activity.
Impacts for city policy and practice
We recommend that researchers, urbanists, and policymakers consider and apply Gehl and Svarre’s methods more extensively and across various cities in their future studies. These would better enable them to design and plan for humans, which ultimately increase the resilience of cities. Specifically, our local study found that Tehran needs more walkable spaces that reduce cars’ domination and empower local economy, which is essential for public life.
Further information
Full research article:
‘How to study public life’ during pandemic and beyond: an inspiration from Gehl and Svarre in Tehran by Borhan Sepehri, Ayyoob Sharifi, MohammadReza Pourjafar, Ehsan Ranjbar, Mohammad Anvar Adibhesami & Saeed Makaremi
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