Using the Component Model of Sustainable Landscape for the Quality Assessment of Urban Natural Public Spaces: A Case Study from Tehran’s River-valleys

Ecological destruction in human-dominated landscapes has significant impacts on environment sustainability internationally. Landscape planning can play a role in mitigating the effects of human-related activities. One element of landscape planning involves the analysis of the biological, spatial and social arrangement of areas in an urban environment and identifying characteristics that are underrepresented in urban natural public spaces. In this study, the quality of public spaces resulting from the regeneration of Tehran’s river-valleys’ natural environment is assessed in relation to landscape ecology principles. We use the components of Bio-spatial-social Logic, Eco-environmentalsocietal Function, Mind-experiential-aesthetic Logic and Eco-environmental-societal Excellence, as the components of a framework, to examine the quality of existing urban natural public spaces and to define deficiencies in the current urban landscape system. Based on multivariate ecological, environmental and societal space, the evaluation made by this component model indicates that the principles of landscape ecology have been disregarded in Tehran’s Rivervalleys land development and various ecological problems have been evolved from its river-valleys’ regenerating projects. Our criterion is based on the alteration of landscape’s content composition and spatial configuration variables to eco-environmental-societal excellence features. The analysis provides a systematic, function evaluation of urban natural public spaces, in three hierarchical levels of Environmental Equilibrium, Geographical-anthropological Sustainability and Eco-environmental-societal Excellence features. Some strategies are introduced for Tehran’s rivervalleys’ landscape variables change.