Identification of factors that assure quality of residential environments, using environmental assessment indices: a comparative study of Two of Tehran’s neighborhoods (Zafaranieh &Khaniabad)

Living in satisfying urban environments is important for an individual’s well-being. In order to create such environments, planners, designers, and policy makers need to understand the structures that cause residents to feel satisfied with their environments. This paper focuses on the perceived quality of urban residential environments: dwellings and neighborhoods. First, literature review was conducted to extract a list of relevant attributes of environmental quality (EQ), which in turn became the theoretical basis for the rest of this work. Next, the general research methodology, the multi-attribute evaluation of perceived quality of urban residential environments, was presented. Hierarchical multiple regression was used for data analysis. Using written questionnaire, residents in two neighborhoods of Tehran, Zafaranieh and Khaniabad were asked to evaluate their present residential situation on the various residential attributes. Due to the presence of north-south dichotomy in Tehran, researcher tried to compare perceptions of the residents of these two neighborhoods. Regressing the general satisfaction evaluations on the specific evaluations revealed a model fit which appeared to be relatively high (49%). It was concluded that next to physical attributes, psycho-social attributes and attributes of built environments are relevant attributes, and EQ may best be seen as a hierarchical multi-attribute concept. Subjective evaluations varied across two neighborhoods and results showed that older people were somewhat more satisfied with their residential environments than younger people.