comparative evaluation of the environmental quality of residential place with an emphasis on citizens' image* (case study: qazvin city)

abstract   when the human habitat can provide more utility to a man who meets his expectations. the expectations are defined in all aspects of environmental, social, physical, economic situation and so on in residential places. if any of these desirable qualities are lacking in a person&apos;s life, will affect both the perception and feeling of space and the level of satisfaction from quality of residential place. on the other hand nowadays more than half of the world&apos;s populations live in urban areas. so the phenomenon of urbanization has become inevitable today. therefore, we should always pay attention that civil society encompasses a wide range of the cultural – social and occupational groups. each of these groups according to the type of insight and norms has different criteria for choosing a place to live and work. therefore they have also different criteria about satisfaction of the city environmental quality. however in developing societies, attention to the demands of all the people is very difficult and complex, so often is reliance only specialist understanding of the qualities of the environment. but in this research we emphasize on the mental image of citizen about urban environmental quality. so, this research, in order to improve environmental quality in urban residential places, trying to answer this question that what a priority criteria and indicators of environmental quality are in the urban residential place in mental image of citizens. to achieve this, first of all, we express the concept of urban environmental quality and its component, then we develop the theoretical model for evaluating the level of residents&apos; satisfactory. the model is divided into five levels; each level evaluates benchmark of one component such as environmental, socio – cultural, economic, physical and management criteria involve in the quality of the environment. in this regard, a questionnaire was designed according to the range of five-point likert scale (1 < x < 5) to assess the quality of the urban environment. 378 questionnaire based on the formula of cochran is distributed between citizens residing in qazvin residential place, and we were using analytical – descriptive method and spss software in data analysis and one-way anova and duncan grouping test to evaluate and rank components of environmental quality in the urban residential place. to determine the validity of the research instrument of the questionnaire we referred to professors and experts, all of them were positive with all comments and the reliability of the questionnaire was assessed by cronbach&apos;s alpha test, the value of this coefficient is 0.927 that shows the high reliability. questionnaires measures the level of environmental quality in two general of quality living environment and quality of residential environment quality in three regions of qazvin. in general summary and conclusion, the results of comparative evaluation between three regions of qazvin indicate that, the citizens of the second region in the neighborhood of the city of qazvin in comparison with other areas of the city are more satisfied with the quality of any components of residential place and the formation of the social fabric has great impact in this results.