Comparing the New and Old Fabrics of Isfahan City Regarding Ecological Criteria

The emergence of new neighborhoodsin historical cities like Isfahan has been due to rapid population growth regardless of the context circumstances and in an attempt to meet the need for housing. On the other hand, old neighborhoods could not often form suitable environments for life because of incapability to meet the needs and wishes of the residents.Contrary to this situation, new ideas and theories are emerging in the urban world in which the main objective is improving the quality of urban environments. One of the basic concerns of modern urban planning in the world is returning to the nature and reducing the problems caused by automation and endless attack to the natural environment of human life. Hence in this study, we tried to further study and analyze one of the outlined characteristics of these ideas known as "Ecological city"and identify and separate the physical characteristics of an ecological city and also compare the physical criteria of new and old districts of the city in terms of closeness to these criteria. The main objectives of this study can be summarized as: 1. recognizingthe physical criteria of the ecologicalcity 2.studying the status of ancient and contemporary urban fabrics in compliance with these criteria. To investigate, twostudy sampleswere selected from Isfahan neighborhoods; one from traditional districts (Charkhab) and the other from contemporary districts (Mardavij). Then, these two areas were analyzed based on physical characteristics using Analytical Hierarchy Process and the results of this analysis were shown by GIS. The results of this analysis indicated superiority of the traditional fabrics to the contemporary one. This represents the human-oriented and sustainable urbanism of the country's pastwhich is neglected and forgotten today.The necessity of analysis of the past urbanism and contemporizing its criteria and indicators concerned with what is known today as the modern urbanism science can be considered as the most important result of this study.