پریسا شرافتی

This article proposes ‘urban acupuncture’ as an emerging concept in the Iranian urban planning literature. It has endeavored to explain urban acupuncture and the learned lessons learned in the urban spatial analysis process. According to the model, the best way to provide structural and infrastructural development is to employ the existing potentials of the city within a network arrangement, valuing soft approaches, like urban acupuncture, to be able to recognize thousands of diverse points in the city for small-scale but effective interventions in the form of a coherent network. Urban acupuncture as a tool with a holistic and networked view of the city identifies the abandoned points. It reintegrates them as new intervention spots into the life cycle of urban green spaces to achieve the sought urban structure. Using the "urban acupuncture" approach with a deductive-analytical methodology from a network perspective in the historical center of Shiraz, this study tries to introduce the existing potential pattern of the abandoned points in the course of moving towards urban ecological sustainability. Thus, it can achieve procedural unity by development based on existing urban environment potentials. Finally, by applying the concept of urban acupuncture, the research tries to compare the urban green network and explain the necessity of this approach by orienting the urban redevelopment to rediscovering a wide range of repressed yet developable parcels within cities as an analogical framework. As such, this process could provide opportunities for designers to intervene in the neural network through the acupuncture approach by remodeling the ecological network and structural development of green spaces to improve urban environments.

Reusing the leftover and abandoned spaces in cities during the classical look towards urban design has mainly encompassed scattered parcels and spaces, separately from the connected urban network. The redesign of such spaces has no close connection with the urban structure as a whole, so the design would not be a wise intervention, leading to a deeper spatial and ecological enhancement of the city. In the historic and urban fabrics of the Iranian traditional cities, a large number of demolitions and clearances that have been done during the last decades has left a vast amount of non-developed lands and parcels, which have actually become parking lots and non-used spaces. The phenomenon of underdeveloped spaces and the increasing number of vacant spaces, which have no interrelation with the urban structure, reveals an urgent need for adoption of more subtle solutions, engaging valuable monuments and historic landmarks within a framework in which the great potentials of the heritage buildings, linear elements, and the whole structure are regarded and improved. Here, a new paradigm has occurred as reuse and redesign of the abandoned spaces became crucial to the urban design. The redesign process would act as such that all the parcels, even the most limited ones, could take a role in the rearrangement of the urban structure and this will show a suitable solution as all the spatial potentials are involved in the process. During the 1980s’ Gordon Matta-Clark tried to recognize a series of leftover spaces in New York City to represent them as chances for a new design, and contexts to organize new amenities and artistic installations. By the absence of the upcoming geographic information technologies, Clark only could manage to find a very little number of parcels accommodating his objectives. Four decades later, and by reviewing many other theoretical approaches emerged since the Clarks’ efforts, Nicholas de Monchaux has re-lanced a new look towards the problem and proposed the newly born concept of ‘Local Codes’. As the code-dependent approach to design has also been a matter of concern among the scholars, by taking the concept of ‘fake’ estate and using the vast possibilities given by the GIS-based software, Monchaux tried to show that it is possible to recover a large number of vacant parcels and redesign them respecting the ecological and functional needs. This reintroduction of parcels to the lifecycle of a city, all along with the intent to redesign the lost spaces, not only gives a spatial opportunity even greater than the largest green or open spaces of the cities, but also revitalize the urban web or its spatial network, resurrecting with its focal points and lines. This paper introduces the approach of “Local Codes” and examines it in the context of an Iranian city. Shiraz with a complete but damaged urban network is the case of this study. After examining the spatial network of the historical fabric, the spatial potentials are revealed and the process of redesigning the network has been shown in terms of a well-connected network.