From Placelessness to Viewpoint

Document Type : Review

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Abstract

Systematic cities must be known as creation of human's ordered mind. Discipline-based “social life" can be used as basis of urban order and a conceptual basis with flexibility and consistency for social life in today’s urban organizations. In such order, urban structure is fixed on public spaces. Comprehensive understanding of the city, by sensual understanding of the city structure while finding its mental order and interpretation based on inhabitant's collective memories, leads to perceiving the city as a "super Place" and "super memory”, which is useful in collective identity of inhabitants. To restore mental order of city, it is necessary to realize "placelessness"- A social part of city fabric- and replace them by social spaces which are useful in collective identity of the city. This article, by choice of Anzali port as a case study, surveys objective order of the city and its antithesis with mental order of Anzali. Firstly, it is approved that comprehensive understanding of the city is resulted by understanding the city center, as basic elements of city structure are agreed in it.  Secondly, after finding the "placeless" space of the city center and discovering its quality for being a "viewpoint", it is suggested that the space be changed to a viewpoint, so that it becomes an element to help to comprehensive understanding of Anzali city center-city's extract. Using post-industrial approach to keep the rest of industrial installation to convert the place to a public place is suggested as a guideline in landscape design.

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