The Role of Spatial Configuration of Neighborhoods in Residents’ Security by “Space Syntax” Method

The phenomenon of increasing urbanization in recent years has brought about complicated problems and obstacles in various fields, especially in citizens’ security almost everywhere. The feeling of security as one of the most important human needs seems to be the main factor of sustainability of urban spaces, particularly urban streets. Introducing Space Syntax Theory and considering “factor of permeability” as the concept of "spatial configuration" has provided opportunity for doing extensive researches in this field as well as representing different ways of configuration impact on various aspects of security. Based on hypothesis ahead this article studies the influence of configuration pattern of neighborhoods on the psychological dimension of security. Configuration is effective on increasing the feeling of security in neighborhoods by increasing the ability of comfortable moving and flow of the pedestrian traffic and the possibility of surveillance on the environment by residents at the local network. To test the hypothesis, the relations between topological features and the degree of paths’ security were studied in two neighborhoods of Karaj City. After analyzing the configuration features of neighborhoods in "Depth Map" software, safe and unsafe paths of both neighborhoods were identified by residents and analyzing the degrees of their security were conducted in "SPSS" by the Cluster Analysis Technique. Then the meaningful relations were analyzed between topological features and the degrees of paths’ security. On this basis, the paths with the high average of depth are more insecure, due to low level of using by pedestrians. Intensive flow of moving and the better surveillance by people in the paths with low average of depth, is the main factor of increasing the degree of the security. Lack of integration in spatial configuration pattern of neighborhoods makes them generally more insecure for the residents in local scale