Assessing the Architectural Compatibility of Urban Buildings With Passive Defense Principles in Eslamshahr City

      The geographical environment, where the city with different shapes and dimensions and various functions is located on it, is the urban field of activity and movement. Dou to the most population of a country live in these environments and often this area is used as economical, political, cultural, and social centers, its readiness to overcome crises should always be considered by the relevant experts. Therefore, security of the cities notify to pay attention to the issue of passive defense. Security is one of the most important challenges for urban planners and managers, and the passive defense approach in urban planning and residential and non-residential buildings in cities has been considered by urban management in order to deal with natural and human threats and crisis management. In this regard, evaluating the compatibility of elements of architecture and urban design with the principles and criteria of passive defense and its prioritizing is considered as one of the main objectives of passive urban defense. Eslamshahr city in Tehran province is one of the challenging areas in the field of architecture and passive urban defense and in this study, this city has been selected as a case study In this regard, the context and form of the city are important from passive defense point of view.Therefore, the purposes of the present study are to clarify a conceptual model for the architectural compatibility of the Eslamshahr’s urban buildings with passive defense principles through assessing the compatible and incompatible elements and to provide the essential strategies. From the point of data type and data collecting method, the methodology of the study was the quantitative-qualitative type. In order to clarify the compatibility of the urban buildings’ architecture with the principles of the passive defense, first, it is essential to evaluate and analyze the degree of the compatibility for the architecture factors and components of the residential and non-residential buildings of the city “Eslamshahr” with the principles of the passive defense. Then, after prioritizing the factors and components, the effective obligations and strategies to develop such architecture in the city shall be determined and combined with the results to provide the ultimate model of clarifying the compatible architecture with the passive defense in the urban areas. Therefore, the present research is a combination of field and statistical methods in which the quantitative and the qualitative methods and tools are used to analyze the data. The data collection methods are library data collection and field data collection. The method of field data collection includes deep and semi-deep interviews, group conversations with people and experts. In addition, field visits and observations, data recording, and questionnaires were used for an accurate evaluation of the results. The method of data analysis is a descriptive-analytical approach. The statistical sample of the research has focused on 30 experts in the field of urban security in Eslamshahr. The data analysis has been done via the statistical analysis and test such as binominal test, one sample T-test, exploratory factor analysis technique, and SWOT analytical model. Therefore, it can be concluded that most parts of residential and non-residential buildings’ architecture are incompatible with principles of passive defense. The most important reasons of the limited architectural compatibility of the city’s buildings are: failure in compliance with urban development criteria in some parts of the city, population of immigrants from different areas to the city and make a difference in the lifestyle of the city, lack of proper observation on the urban constructions, low awareness of the people and the authorities about the passive defense criteria, the use of non-standard materials in the construction of some city’s buildings, low level of supervision of the municipality and the Housing and Urban Development Organization, the construct of heavy structures with weak pillars,  not enough attention to the internal access routes,  improper attention to the vital installations of the city, the use of glass in the façade of many buildings especially in commercial buildings, not enough attention to the escape stairs in tall buildings, the inconsistent physical growth of the constructions, incoordination and the interference of the tasks between the organizations and institutes involved in the urban constructions, lack of a comprehensive land-use plan accepted by all the organizations and etc.  Accordingly, some strategies have also been proposed to eliminate incompatible elements and to reinforce compatible elements, which mainly refers to public participation, rules and plans for urban architecture refurbishment and renovation, physical reorganization, citizenship training, and so on. After measuring the architectural compatibility degree of the buildings, this section pays to the strategic planning in order to identify the strength, weakness, opportunity and threat factors and to provide optimal strategies in the field of urban architecture for Eslamshahr’s buildings. The primary results indicated that the constructions in Eslamshahr are not so compatible with the passive defense approach; the level of its compatibility is between low and average. The results of the present research have led to a model to clarify the compatibility of the passive defense approach for urban constructions, which is based on four main categories including pioneer factors, developing factors, leading factors, and supportive factors. The relations and the combinations of the categories are set according to the structure of a car wheel, which can ultimately prepare the grounds for developing stable and safe architecture in the urban constructions.