The Evaluation of Co-Presence Pattern in the New Social Spaces

Throughout history, urban space has functioned as a meeting place on many levels for city dwellers. People met, exchanged news, made deals, and arranged marriages- street artists entertained and goods were offered for sale. People attended Large and small city events. Processions were held, power was manifested, parties and punishments held publicly - everything was carried out in full public view. The city was the meeting place. But today these social places are decreasing and instead new social spaces like mega shopping malls are being constructed in cities, thus making sure these spaces work properly to attract human interactions is very important. The aim of this article is to introduce new methods to understand and model human (agents) behavior and co-presence patterns.
Unfortunately, at the moment there are no good methods used in Iran to understand and predict co-presence patterns in public spaces, as a result in this article two methods, space syntax and mobile cellular data were examined based on agent based modeling theory and their role in understanding patterns of co-presence was reviewed. Then the case study of Kourosh shopping mall was analyzed through these methods. The results show that the southern part of the complex has more capabilities for social gatherings and events and also that the peak of human traffic in a day in this complex is 7 PM., the most crowded days of the week are Thursdays and Fridays and that the first and last days of the month are actually the busiest days of the complex. In the end it was concluded that these methods can shed light upon our decision making process to have better quality of life with improving new social spaces.