A Semiotic Approach to the Elements of the Historical Axis of Sepah Street in Qazvin and Reading of its Spatial Identity from a Phenomenological Perspective

Landmarks are among the outstanding physical elements of urban spaces and play an effective role in forming spatial identity due to their presence in citizens’ collective and individual memories. Thus, the process of reading landmarks and studying their different semantic layers can be considered as a valuable tool for assessing urban identity. Given the wide range of components of urban identity, in the present study, it is attempted to use a semiotic and phenomenological approach to the elements of the historical axis of Sepah Street in Qazvin to read landmarks and thereby, sense of identity to space. Since Sepah Street, as the first designed street in Iran since the Safavid era, has an organized physical and conceptual structure, the study of which as one of the elements introducing the city identity is significant. To do this, it is assumed that the semiotic relationship between important and historical landmarks of Sepah Street plays an effective role in reading the spatial identity of the street in citizens’ mental and objective perception from a phenomenological perspective. Accordingly, the present study aims to identify the nature of landmarks in Sepah Street in relation to its identity using descriptive-analytical and survey methods. First, using a descriptive-analytical method, the characteristics of landmarks identifying an urban space are identified, and then, through a survey method, the selected components are phenomenologically tested using a research-made questionnaire, interview with citizens and observation of the case study. Then the data are analyzed using a coding method and SPSS 20 software. The results of the present study indicate that there is a significant semiotic relationship between the common phenomenological components of identity and landmarks so that the rich relationships between landmarks, their physical, functional and semantic characteristics and mutual interaction with citizens in the process of perception of street and being stable and memorable in citizens' minds directly play a role in forming the identity of the street and making it perdurable in people's collective and personal memory