Explaining the Effectiveness of Human Perception of the Environment in Different Types of Garden City: A Comparative Study of Garden Cities of Dehkede and Mehrshahr

The quality improvement of the environment to ensure the citizens’ satisfaction with urban planning processes is one of the fundamental development principles. The environment results from activities, concepts and physical characteristics, and the user perception provides an analytical approach to spatial judgment. The importance of responding to the different perceptual levels of the individual by different environmental factors indicates the necessity of investigating the environment quality from the perspective of perceptual experience. Therefore, the crisis of the expansion of environments without experiential usefulness resulting from functionalist approaches causes inefficiencies in meeting needs, which endangers urban life along with damaging behavioral mechanisms. This study aimed to explain the effectiveness of environmental quality on the experiential perception of the residents of two garden cities in Alborz province with the assumption of the existence of a relationship between the environment quality in public spaces and the audience perception to answer the nature of this relationship. The village has controlled traffic, limited services, and enclosed bodies separated from the urban context, but Mehrshahr is equipped with neighborhood services without peripheral restrictions and traffic control, whose space syntax was preserved during joint construction. Two garden cities were compared based on the effects of different contextual features on the users' experience regarding the satisfaction level concerning the aesthetic and physical-spatial components. This descriptive-analytical and mixed study was conducted by the random distribution of questionnaires among the residents, and variables were analyzed with SPSS and hypothesis testing using t-statistics. The results revealed that the perimeter fence and checkered structure of the village ensured the enclosure by creating communities through plant demarcation, and the lack of neighborhood walls and inclusiveness of the passages increased the continuity with the benefit of the corridors of view to the open spaces. The variety of formic houses in Mehrshahr, along with curvilinear design by changing the viewing angle, improved the spatial contrast and the coordination of the volume, façade, use of buildings, visual proportions, and the pedestrian axis satisfied the scale criteria. Personal gardens, natural landscapes, and visual-motor diversity in both collections have created equal aesthetic quality standards. Finally, the main success factors of the perceptual experience were inviting people tired of the boredom of hectic urban life, continuous greenness on the outer wall, enhancing the visual beauty of the neighboring urban texture landscape in the village, and emphasizing the order and geometric schema in Mehrshahr.