The Role of the Semantic Relationship with the Environment in Creating Human Dignity According to the Participants of the Urban Public Space

Human dignity is a qualitative concept that has a significant effect on the urban public space. The value of a human being and his status, as a thinking being, is raised in this concept. Environmental meaning and relationship with that in the environment are among the concepts that are of great importance in the urban public space. It is necessary to study the influential factors on achieving human dignity by the semantic relationship with the environment. Discovering human dignity in a space used by the citizens is of significant importance. Thus, the current research aimed to study the subjective and interactive nature of this phenomenon and its resulted experience and perception in the actors, and recognize their perceptions and how to create the sense of human dignity. The current study was interpretivism research and emphasized the action and interaction of the researcher with the case study in terms of epistemology. The explicit inductive content analysis was applied as a research method to interpret the contextual data resulted from 13 in-depth unstructured interviews. The data were analyzed through systematic coding and to classify the concepts into three levels of abstraction. The participants were selected using the purposive sampling method and continued until reaching saturation to develop the concepts. The findings indicate that one of the concepts of the public perception of human dignity is the semantic relationship with the environment; it is a concept that becomes more meaningful by the warm feeling of the walls, attraction of the traditional texture, sensory richness, sense of belonging, and inner and subjective concentration. The interrelationship of these factors and their complicated relationship are considerable, leading to creating a sense of human dignity among people. One of the most significant results is to discover the relationship between the semantic relationship and the environment in creating the sense of human dignity.