Application of ‘Place Design Quality Indicator’ (PDQI) Method in the Comparative Assessment of Historic and Cultural Urban Spaces Case Study: Two Historic-Cultural Places in Historic Urban Fabric of Shiraz

Assessing the quality of urban design in historic urban fabrics and measuring the success of plans which have been prepared for historic areas are crucial issues for urban regeneration process and management of urban heritage. During the last decades, a variety of tools and measuring methods are provided to architects and urban designers for estimating the quality of environments they have made intervention in them. Measuring the quality of design for the purpose of making better places or improving the sense of place is the central point for such interventions. Among the developed tools, Design Quality Indicator (DQI) method has been introduced as a method to evaluate the output of building design taking three indicators into account: ‘build quality’, ‘functionality’ and ‘impact’. These three indicators have close conceptual correlations with the models introduced for materializing the concept of ‘place’. Build quality can obviously be related to ‘form’; functionality, indicates the functional aspect of the place and is related to ‘activity’; and the impact could summarize a great deal of interactions among people and place and their experiences summed-up as ‘meaning’ and ‘image’. This concept was the key to develop a more sophisticated tool for analyzing the quality of design in a broader urban scale. This paper is aimed to develop a model derived from DQI model and named as PDQI, which stands for ‘Place Design Quality Indicator’. This model adds the aspects of place to the design quality assessment, and focuses on the historic places as the context of the design process. In this new interpretation, the significance of place has been determined using more advanced criteria, which are established in historic places by international charters and conventional documents. PDQI goes beyond the limits of the previous model, and provides a new horizon in which the characteristics of historic place are the main factors to evaluate the quality of design. This time designers and users are asked to score the design output by means of three major indicators. These indicators, which are represented as ‘Authenticity and Value’, ‘Physical Integrity’ and ‘Economical Vibrancy’, one more time are referring to the concept of place as mentioned in the literature prior to this work. By applying the proposed methodology for two historic places situated in the historic fabric of Shiraz, the quality of design implied in the urban design and revitalization project of a historic area in 1990s’ has been assessed and compared with the PDQI tool. The result shows that although similar urban design project have been taken for these two places, however, as far as the design quality is concerned, each place has its own conditions, which affects the quality of the output, and the perception of users and other designers has widely been affected by these. As a result, the authors declare that this method can be applied as a general tool for analyzing the design quality in historic places and it can make its way into a more complete tool to be developed by further researches.