The notion of privacy represents a central criterion for both indoor and outdoor social spaces in most traditional Arab settlements. This paper investigates privacy and everyday life as determinants of the physical properties and patterns of the built and urban fabric and will study their impact on traditional settlements and architecture of the home in the contemporary Iraqi city. It illustrates the relationship between socio-cultural aspects of public and private realms using the notion of the social sphere as an investigative tool of the concept of social space in Iraqi houses and local communities (Mahalla). This paper reports that in spite of the impact of other factors in articulating built forms, privacy embodies the primary role under the effects of Islamic rules, principles and culture. The crucial problem is the underestimation of traditional inherited values through opening social spaces to the outside that giving unlimited accesses to the indoor social environment creating many problems with regard to privacy and communal social integration.
Since cities are constantly changing, their new forms and activities are developed according to their patterns and physical arrangements. Sustainable urban forms are currently a widely discussed topic in the concept of urban sustainability. The physical forms of cities can be conceptualised as two interlocking planes. The first comprises the spatial distribution of activities and buildings. The second is made up of the pattern of streets, parks and the public realm. Sustainable integration between these layers leads to a compatibly built environment. This paper intends to formulate sustainable urban form indicators as a conceptual framework model that provides a comprehensive understanding of how sustainability can be evaluated and measured according to the pattern of any built environment. This framework consists of eight indicators: Accessibility, Connectivity, Compatibility, Diversity, Nodality, Density, Identity, and Adaptability. Accordingly, two of the most significant sustainable urban districts have been chosen for field study. The first is the Hammarby residential district in Stockholm, Sweden and the second is the Vauban residential district in Freiburg, Germany. The research concludes that good performance of urban pattern indicators in these developed communities may motivate, inform and improve design strategies for achieving a more sustainable urban context.
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