Urban landscape evaluation to explain the city's tourism brand, Case study: Isfahan metropolis

Paying attention to urban landscape is one of the main and most significant factors that can have a great effect on urban brand. Compared to other cities, tourist cities depend more on the quality of the urban landscape. Since what initially attracts individual's attention is the urban landscape; moreover, it makes the first judgments about the city in the minds of tourists. The city of Isfahan with a rich historical, cultural, artistic, natural background, etc. is one of the most significant tourist destinations in Iran. With the purpose of explaining the urban landscape tourism brand, this research investigates 100 landscapes of Isfahan by an expert evaluation including historical landscape, natural landscape, cultural landscape and so on from two objective and subjective dimensions and based on 25 indices. Cluster analysis method has been used for clustering landscapes; furthermore, clustering analysis has been applied by using SPSS software in order to analyze the objective and subjective characteristics of landscapes. The results indicate that the historical-natural landscape of Isfahan has the highest score among the clusters; in addition, there is a significant relationship between the objective dimension of the landscape (physical and functional aspects) and the semantic (subjective) dimension of it.