A Strategic Attitude to Architectural Design with a Culture-Based Psychological Approach (Case Study: Public Spaces in Kermanshah)

Recently, the quality of public spaces has become a significant issue in societies. Also, considering the human-environment relationship, creating a high level of sense of place through the design process can lead to efficient environments. Because each culture has a different perception of environment, design for each environment requires understanding the prevailing culture that can affect the components shaping the environmental affordances role and the quality of place in its specific user’s mind. Therefore, this study aims to identify the factors affecting the quality of architectural space and strengthen the sense of place with a culture-based psychological approach. Accordingly, the main question is: how do the physical factors affect the sense of place in public spaces under the influence of socio-cultural currents? Thus, these factors were categorized in different perceptual-cognitive dimensions regarding the users’ personality traits based on cultural factors. This developmental-applied research explores prior researcher’s theories with a descriptive-analytical method leading to an explanatory model and the resulting theory, which of course consequently has to be validated using statistical techniques. The results show that various cultures lead to the dominance of some personality traits, differences in mental schemas, cognitive maps, perceptions of the environmental affordances, and consequently different degrees of sense of place. Accordingly, considering the effect of region-specified users’ psychological personality types on their perception of the environment’s physical components, it is possible to design effectively, achieve the desired degrees of sense of place, and improve the quality of life through improving the quality of space.