Principles of Designing Urban Open Spaces in the Globalization Era (Case Study: Tehran Historical Center)

With globalization, the economies of most countries have become incorporated in a global capitalist
economy through the advanced communication technologies and multi-national companies and
institutions. This process causes some changes in the nature and form of built environment such as public
spaces, etc. There for, the globalization leads to a kind of fear about creating similar landscapes around the
world, commercialization of the built environment, transformation of the urban form, threatening the local
landscapes and identities and ultimately damaging the built environment, as well as the natural one. So the
attention to the local ideas will be necessary. Urban public open spaces and globalization have a Mutual
interaction. On one hand globalization affects on forms and activities of public open spaces, and on other
hand urban public spaces have a considerable influence on competitiveness and competitive picture of
cities and are of great importance for the urban culture and city life. Thus urban open spaces have an
important role in addressing with cities of globalization era. Because of that in this paper, the open spaces
of the historical center of Tehran are considered. The key questions of this paper are as follows: 1-What
are the impacts of globalization on public open spaces in Tehran? 2- How the urban public spaces can help
non-global cities to have a stronger position in the global era? This paper shows that Tehran with a
population of about 12 million is one of the important capitals in the Middle East and has a dominant role
in national transactions but it has recognized as a non-global city. Different studies confirm this too. Short
(2004), classifies Tehran in his "black holes" and describes it in the typology of non-world cities as a
"resisting city". With the criteria of GAWC Research group, Tehran has minimal evidences of world city
formation but it is not a global city. Also some studies show that Tehran has not started globalization
process yet and as the process develops, this city stays more and more behind it. In accordance with this
research , although Tehran is not a global city and even has not started the globalization process so far, but
it needs to achieve the requirements of competitiveness in the era of globalization and enhancement its
global image. According to the above mentioned approach, design principles of urban open spaces of the
historical center of Tehran in the era of globalization, is identified and presented. These design principles
are: 1- Improvement of Global Image of Tehran and Efficiency in Local Scale, 2- Access to information,
3- Efficiency in local scale, 4- Identical Continuity, 5- Legibility and Meaning, 6- Animation and
Richness, 7- Safety and Security and 8- Ingravibility. Finally this paper presents a series of actions to
follow in designing the public realm of non-global cities (like Tehran) in the context of globalization era.