A comparative study of Takht Foulad cemetery and Golestan Shohada of Isfahan regarding the quality of "spirituality" in urban spaces

Modernism has played an important role in the development of human life in technological dimensions, but its aterialistic view has made cities and urban spaces face basic challenges in social, cultural, environmental and spiritual fields. Therefore, paying attention to the quality of spirituality in the construction and measurement of urban spaces is an important step in dealing with these challenges. Therefore, the aim of this research is to understand the dimensions of the quality of spirituality in urban spaces and evaluate it in some urban spaces of Isfahan. In the qualitative part, the literature of the subject has been explained by a systematic review. In the quantitative part, the votes of two groups of elites (51 people) and citizens (400 people) in order to rank the perception of spirituality from 22 selected spaces of Isfahan city based on the Likert scale were analyzed using a questionnaire and using Friedman’s test to rank the perception of spirituality. One-way analysis of variance has been used to compare the perception of the sense of spirituality in the respondent group. According to the scores of two groups of elites and citizens, regarding the level of spirituality in the urban spaces of Isfahan, Jame Mosque scored the highest and Bazarche Hassan Abad scored the lowest. Also, among the types of space, “Cemetery” has received the highest score in terms of spirituality. Therefore, the two important cemetery of Isfahan, Takht Foulad Cemetery (the public tomb and the tomb of religious and cultural celebrities) and Golestan Shohada were selected as case study to conduct in-depth interviews with citizens (21 people) and the interviews were analyzed by thematic analysis. The results indicate that silence, solitude, peace, Islamic architecture of buildings and monuments, the integration of nature and natural elements with the tomb, the visibility of the sky and the vastness of the area; Also, the mental dimensions of the space, including the sense of remembrance, the sense of separation from the world, the connection with divine saints and religious elders are among the most important factors in creating spirituality in these cemetery.