Investigating the factors influencing the creation and promotion of place attachment in public libraries of Iran.

Human beings are social creatures and they have to attend public and informal spaces for the meeting of their needs. This is while we are faced with the shortage of the public spaces in the course of the cities’ development and there is felt a need for places for social interaction and gathering with the ascent in the society’s individualization trend. Third place is a general term for various kinds of the public spaces that host the regular, voluntary and informal assemblies away from the work and home areas. The third place is a space enabling the meeting and conversation with friends, neighbors, coworkers and even strangers. The individuals with various age and gender properties can satisfy their required wants and perform their needed activities through presence in these social spaces. The third place possesses the potential for the creation of opportunities in line with the individuals’ gathering around and establishment of social relations and it can set the ground for the development of a sense of attachment. The human beings’ need for the affectionate interaction with the place where in they live and/or, in other words, attachment to the place is amongst the most important aspects of the human-place relationship that has to be taken into account by the urban architects, designers and planners. Attachment to a place is the point at which the contextual elements, activities and mental concepts of the place intersect. This sense of attachment causes the transformation of space to a place with certain sensory and behavioral attributes for the individuals. Library is a sort of public space and, as clearly understood from its definition, the public spaces should be the ground of the citizens and users’ use and collective communication and they have to be able to contribute to the increase in the opportunities of the social interaction. Thus, a public urban space like a library should induce the trait “attachment to the place”. Due to the communication with the various individuals of the society, libraries play a particular role in the promotion of science and enhancement of the culture of book and book-reading. As a third place, a public library should be designed in such a way that it can set the ground for the citizens’ presence as the proper social locus and container and encourage them to study and create a sense of attachment in the attendants. Amongst the outcomes of this issue’s negligence, the reduction in the amount of the libraries’ use and reduction in their social roles, vanishing of the sense of attachment and individuals’ separation can be pointed out. Therefore, approaching the library as a place for the social interaction has come about for responding to the needs of the today’s society. The present study aims at achieving the indicators effective in the creation of attachment to the public libraries. In line with this, efforts will be made for finding answers to the following three essential questions: what factors cause attachment to the place in the public spaces? What variables exert a larger deal of effect on the creation of attachment to place in the studied case? What are the solutions for designing libraries as the third place in such a way that a sense of attachment can be provoked in the attendants? The present study is an applied research which has been carried out based on a qualitative and quantitative study method. The study has been drawn on logical reasoning. The method of gathering information for the achievement of the study’s theoretical foundation is the library and documentary research and the indicators have been extracted from inside the texts. In this study and in the first step, concepts like third place, attachment to place, attachment to public libraries as the first of the society’s public spaces and legality governing the designing of the libraries have been scrutinized for the achievement of the study’s theoretical foundations; then, the attachment to place has been analyzed and investigated in four successful library in Iran, namely Tehran’s garden of books, Iran’s national Library, Jondi Shapour Library and Pen Library. In the end, the extent of the indicators’ influence on the sample “garden of books” has been assessed through questionnaires based on flexible method following which the indicators were extracted within the format of diagrams. Next, solutions have been offered for designing libraries as the third places with an approach to sense of attachment to place in the users. It was made clear in this study that six aspects, namely contextual, social, functional, semantic, sensory, individual and temporal, have effects on the creation and enhancement of attachment to place in the public libraries. The results of this study emphasize on the importance of the sensory and contextual indicators with the highest coefficient of correlation with the sense of attachment to place. Based thereon, amongst the indices of the indicator “sensory aspect”, “satisfaction” and, amongst the indices of the indicator “contextual aspect”, “comfortability and convenience” have the highest effect on the sense of attachment to the place. In the end of the article, practical solutions have been offered for the designing of the library based on the attributes of the third place and with an emphasis on the increase in the attachment to the place. In the end, the designing solutions have been offered with the format of six aspects, namely contextual, social, functional, semantic, sensory and temporal, and 25 indicators. Therefore, the application of these solutions in the designing and redesigning of the public spaces like public libraries enables the transformation of these spaces into third places that can create a sense of spatial attachment in the attendants. This means that the higher the sense of attachment to the public spaces citywide such as libraries in the individuals and attendants, the more frequent would be their voluntary presence in the intended spaces. Thus, sense of attachment to a place is a significant factor when designing an environment.