Investigating the Effect of Physical Structure of Historical Bushehr’s Fabric on Residents' Presence Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis

The Lack of social life and interactions creates many problems, leading to a lack of development of individuals, and consequently a lack of development of society. It is absolutely imperative, therefore, for people to be more and better present in the community. Given the fact that today’s dimensions of human social life are ignored, whilst in the past, these aspects were taken more seriously, this paper aims to explore and analyse the effective ways to create and strengthen sociability in successful historical cities in order to use them in modern urbanism and architecture. Accordingly, the historical fabric of Bushehr city, which has been one of the successful examples in presence of the people regardless of different cultures and religions, was selected as the study case. The questions are ‘what is the relationship between the urban body of the historical fabric of Bushehr with the presence and socialability of the people?’ and, ‘what factors causes this level of sociability? In response, the study was conducted using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in a descriptive-analytical way. The research structure was set up in two parts; The theoretical and literature section was done qualitatively and using library resources to extract the factors of the model. The field section was conducted quantitatively using a questionnaire and for testing model, using a binominal test in SPSS software and confirmatory factor analysis of users' opinions in Lisrel statistical software. Based on the research findings, the validity of the conceptual model was confirmed by convergent construct validity technique and its reliability was confirmed by composite reliability technique. The proposed model's fit of confirmatory factor analysis (5 Parts of the historical fabric of Bushehr including square, piazza, street, sidewalks and alleys and 4 factors affecting socialability including environmental comfort, security, welfare, diversity and attractiveness) based on factor loading of t, RMSEA, RMR, P-value, GFI, AGFI, etc., was confirmed at the confidence level, 95%. The results showed that the extracted model and its factors are suitable for measuring the amount of Socialability in the historical fabric of Bushehr, and among the factors, the index of welfare and diversity and attractiveness in the square space has the highest priority for users.