A study of the relationship between neighbourhood syntactic properties and walking and sitting behaviour in three urban contexts in Tehran

This paper studies the relationship between walking and sitting behaviour and the physical environment in the neighbourhood within the frameworks of behavioural setting and environmental affordance. It analyses the space syntax by using results obtained from a survey and software that uses correlation coefficients. The studied contexts include an organic (historical) context in Chizar, an orthogonal (modern) context with a combination of urban squares in Narmak, and another orthogonal (modern) context combined with hierarchical passages (cul-de-sacs) in the Khazane neighbourhood in Tehran. The results show a significant correlation between respondents' house location, their use of behavioural settings, and evaluation of environmental affordances for both walking and sitting. Correlations are generally highest for integration and mean depth attributes, and relatively higher in the organic context of Chizar. The orthogonal context with a combination of squares in Narmak is better for walking and the organic context in Chizar for sitting. The Khazane context shows medium results in both cases and lower correlations. Regarding the integration attribute, its correlation is direct with sitting or gathering, and inverse with walking. This result is inconsistent with the findings of numerous previous studies which may in turn be recognised as a characteristic of a specific spatial culture.