Mahyar Arefi

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• PhD
• Affiliate Professor at University of Tehran

Many disciplines—from science to art and education—engage with the postdigital concept, where human activities transform into digital activities. The post-COVID-19 era has involved new consequences for societies, where education has increasingly utilized online platforms. Having said that, online pedagogy, with the directions and discourses of the...

This study explores the nexus between socio-demographics and building attributes on the one hand, and the 311 non-emergency services – a state-of-the-art self-reported data source reflecting the residents’ noise complaints on the other. While inevitable and bothersome regardless of the location or lifestyle, noise demonstrates people’s exposure to...

The COVID-19 pandemic has further compounded the inherent complexities of design pedagogy. At the same time, offering an online teaching method made it imperative to incorporate the pandemic’s implications in the design process upon experiencing its adverse impacts. This study investigates landscape architecture students’ design approaches and unde...

Purpose of Review Noise is penetrating urban life pervasively and is imperative for demonstrating the factors behind it regarding built environment, aka buildings and urban form. So, this review aims to provide a better understanding of the association between building acoustics and urban form characteristics. Recent Findings There is a growing at...

The COVID-19 continues to take its toll on human life. Even though to a less threatening extent, and insignificant to some, noise turns out to be one of its consequences without consensus. While individuals experience multiple restrictions and restrain from exuberant activities by spending most of their time at home, reducing public transportation...

This study revisits the sense of place and sound nexus in the literature. Along with that, it seeks to explore the approaches that influential urban theorists, landscape architects, and planners have recommended. How these concepts converge within the allied disciplines of urban planning, urban design, geography, and landscape architecture remains...

Due partly to neoliberal policies—especially in developing countries—and as a result of globalization, urban informality has become an indisputable part of urbanization since the 1970s. As a developing country, Iran has also dealt with the onset of this type of urbanism since the 1920s. The majority of global studies recognize the status of informa...

This article unfolds how the predominant binary view towards urban design offers an alternative tripartite interpretation. This less orthodox but more realistic probing of the field's methods of praxis (hybridity, spontaneity, and continuity) “dissolves” its dominant formal-informal binary categorizations. Hybridity represents the synergistic city-...

As a self-reporting data source, the 311 non-emergency service reflects the residents’ concerns on various environmental complaints, including noise. This study explores the nexus between noise complaints extracted from this data source and the transportation-related inequality that reflects a wide range of socio-demographic cohorts associated with...

While scholars have copiously explored different aspects of Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs) over the last decades, the literature falls short on examining their noise implications. This study examines the planning, transportation, and environmental implications of noise in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area by performing geostatistical an...

The idea of “smart cities” emerged from the contemporary technological advancements and with the aim of enhancing cities’ performance and improving the quality of life. As it turns out, the emerging theories and definitions have not kept up with the speed of technological innovations and their utilities in urban lifestyles. This paper provides a co...

COVID-19 has affected people’s lives in different ways from reduced mobility and staying-at-home orders to other daily life routines. These changes have, in turn, affected the quality of life in urban environments including air quality and noise. The noise aspect, for example, suggests quieter environments due to fewer vehicles on streets, and less...

Over the last decades, Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs) have stimulated various debates in several contexts including environmental and transportation planning. Scholars have explored the TODs’ broad spatial and socioeconomic characteristics; however, very few studies (if at all) have conducted their attributes including mixedland use in regard...

With various possibilities associated with their planning and design from walkable pockets to ample public spaces for different socio-demographic cohorts, Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs) claim to improve their residents’ quality-of-life (QoL). Having been explored from various aspects, very few studies have explored their sound implications, p...

Understanding the nexus between soundscape and urban form is challenging. This research explores soundscapes in new urbanist (NU) developments to contribute to the urban form studies of sound environment. NU developments promote the quality of life (QoL) in dense, walkable settings with mixed-use buildings. An under-examined, yet critical aspect of...

Scholarly debates on the unique features of transit-oriented developments (TODs) have surged over the last decade. Studies have examined their amenities and disamenities; however, lacking is exploring the relationship between TOD sound levels and buildings. Understanding this relationship has implications for communities and the urban form from env...

The literature on graduate-level studio and capstone courses, and the steady decline in student enrollment in recent years demand creative pedagogies to lure undergraduate students into planning. This paper explores the role of self-discovery at the undergraduate level as a conduit toward increasing student recruitment. Forty-seven University of Te...

As palimpsests of multiple layers of historic, geo-political, and socio-economic complexity, contemporary cities demand innovative methods of deciphering and unraveling their development. Typically referred to as reading the city, these methods of delayering and synthesizing urban complexity have, for long, pre-occupied urban planners and decisionm...

The current wedge between planning education and practice on one hand, and planners’ crisis of identity on the other, call for developing more integrative teaching strategies with measurable outcomes. This paper explores how planners can integrate site planning and design techniques with real estate bottom-lines. Based on project reports for a land...

Who shapes our cities? In an age of increasing urban pluralism, globalization and immigration, decreasing public budgets, and an ongoing crisis of authority among designers and planners, the urban environment is shaped by a number of non-traditional stakeholders. The book surveys the kaleidoscope of views on the agency of urbanism, providing an ove...

This chapter aims to provide a critical overview of the World Bank’s loaning policies. Such a broad perspective would help better understand the conditions under which the Bank operates and the ways in which the borrowing countries could possibly benefit more from such loans. To even get a better sense, a preliminary distinction is made between the...

This chapter takes a closer look at the people- vs. place-prosperity distinction as a way of conceptualizing enablement in informal settlements. While Winnick popularized this distinction as a formal regional planning apparatus during the 1960s, the pros and cons of its relevance to informal settlements are discussed here. Whether physical upgradin...

This chapter serves two purposes: first, to discuss the research methodology and data collection based on an ethnographic account of the physical upgrading efforts from the five target cities; second, to report the preliminary clues following data analysis and synthesis. The inherent complexity and messiness of informal settlements made it imperati...

This chapter chronicles the history of informal settlements (Sokoonatgah haye- Gheir Rasmi in Farsi) and the policies addressing them in Iran. While tracing its recent history to the Post-World War II period, it explores the reasons why informal settlements are expanding rapidly in Iran, and briefly outlines five sets of constraints (physical, nati...

This chapter chronicles the brief history of each of the five Iranian target cities that received partial funding from the World Bank for upgrading their informal settlements. While geographically distinct, each city represents unique climatic, historic, cultural, ethnic, and spatial/morphological characteristics. For example, with its glorious his...

This chapter focuses on the analysis and synthesis or aggregation of the “enabling” categories and linking them in this research. The people- vs. place-based dichotomy of physical upgrading resulted in ten themes including enablement , physical upgrading , regularization , service delivery , capacity building , integration, leadership and governanc...

This chapter provides a broad theoretical overview of informality by outlining some popular misconceptions on informality: that informal settlements are solely a developing countries’ problem; that those myths are essentially long-gone; and, that the distinction between formality and informality still holds. This chapter briefly touches on each of...

This chapter gleans some lessons and reflects on assessing the outcomes of the World Bank’s physical upgrading loan allocated in each target city. These lessons, in their own right, have important policy implications given that the World Bank’s assessment acknowledging that 90% of the loan was earmarked for urban upgrading and only 3% for housing r...

This book explores the tenacity of Iran’s informal settlements against the backdrop of the World Bank’s USD 80 million loan for physical upgrading. Arefi seeks to identify and unravel the distinctive models, policies, processes, and outcomes associated with it, and explains why—despite obvious challenges—informal settlements remain popular in Iran,...

Slums are typically perceived as substandard eyesores, corrupt, makeshift, impoverished and crime-ridden. The growing literature on resilience challenged these perceptions, and promoted new debates on their ingenuity and adaptability to overcome external circumstances. Yet these debates are often limited to short term coping and adaptive capacity o...

This article explores the roles metaphors and analogies play in architectural design thinking. Architects, planners, and designers use these cognitive tools extensively. While the linkages between metaphors, analogies, and design thinking are not new, how architects use them is not systematically explored. Metaphors and analogies are used idiosyncr...

This study critically explores collaboration opportunities between architects and planners. Architects typically emphasize site design, whereas planners stress prospects for community engagement. The collaboration opportunity prompts these professions to learn from each other synergistically. This case study outlines the efforts of two groups of ar...

Interest in slums within the urban planning community has increased recently (Porter, 2011; Dovey, 2012). It is a welcome move considering, over a billion people live in these settlements worldwide (UNHabitat, 2010). However, most of the existing urban policy frameworks often consider them a sign of planning failure due to their physical imperfecti...

A new taxonomy of placemaking is needed; concerns have been expressed about the professionalization of placemaking through the proliferation of standards, zoning codes, and restrictive covenants. "Place matters" has become a mantra in many disciplines-architecture, urban planning and urban design, geography, and sociology to name a few. While conce...

This article probes ‘the structure of visual difference’ and its planning implications. Identifying the visual ‘differences’ in a place helps people express their opinions about its social meaning and image, and ultimately the areas they would like to see change, protected or preserved. The article examines two new aspects of difference: first, tha...

This paper is the outcome of a sustainable urban management conference held in Dubai in 2010. A number of high ranking city officials including mayors, vice mayors, city council members and urban planners attended the conference and shared their opinions about the formidable challenges facing Iran cities and their perceived solutions. Drawing from...

This article explores the utility of structural engineering concepts in the architectural design process. The widening gap between architects and structural engineers who pursue divergent intentions during the design process prompted this research. While the architects lament the insensitivity and unfamiliarity of structural engineers towards share...

As a key component of Iran’s urban policy and planning, new town development has been scrutinised from various aspects such as design and architecture, geography, and sociology, with much of the literature concentrating on the substantive challenges of the development process. Missing, however, is the account of its procedural challenges arising fr...

This article explores the relationship between knowledge and sustainable placemaking. Distinguishing between "expert knowledge" and "local knowledge," it first problematizes expert knowledge, and then traces the local knowledge approach to placemaking. The widening gap between expert and local knowledge prompts understanding their sources and modes...

How do cities transform over time? And why do some cities change for the better while others deteriorate? In articulating new ways of viewing urban areas and how they develop over time, Peter Bosselmann offers a stimulating guidebook for students and professionals engaged in urban design, planning, and architecture. By looking through Bosselmann’...

This article explores the notion of 'order' in informal settlements. Informal or squatter settlements typically epitomize physically chaotic and cluttered, socially and politically disorganized phenomena. Governments and public opinion have long shared and permeated such physical, social, and political stereotypes about these settlements, which mak...

This article revisits the concept of place in planning and urban design and proposes a conceptual framework consisting of four ontological constructs of place as a set of visual attributes, product, process, and meaning. The article discusses the theoretical underpinnings of each concept and explores the advantages of a continuum between these term...

While planners and policymakers have recognized the role of the local assets, including physical capital (housing stock, roads, and the public space) and social capital (the informal networks of trust and reciprocity) in creating healthy communities, the nexus between such assets and policymaking remains vague. This article explores this linkage by...

The concepts of place, non-place, and placelessness were used in a course on reading the American city during the winter quarter of 2003 at the University of Cincinnati. The course was open to both graduate as well as undergraduate students and some 16 planning and architecture students registered for it. The class examined these concepts against t...

What constructs are used to characterize public space? This paper analyzes residents’ perceptions of public space, using data from Visakhapatnam (usually referred to as “Vizag”), India—a city of 1.3 million people on the Bay of Bengal. Extensive interviews, 37 in number, were conducted, using composite group sampling. The sample was drawn from all...

The dual public policy tensions of people prosperity versus place prosperity and need-based versus asset-based approaches to community development provide a conceptual framework to evaluate the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative. In 1994, this thirty-month program set out to revitalize eight inner-city Los Angeles neighborhoods through technical a...

This paper looks at community renewal and how public art might play a constructive role. Based on the premise that "the poor" are people struggling fundamentally with destructive shame (debilitating feelings of dependency, deficiency, and self-disdain), guidelines for creating public art that may help in countering this shame are proposed. In count...

This paper investigates linkages between social capital and physical capital as an approach toward capacity building. It examines the revitalisation efforts of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI) communities with mixed outcomes. Various stages of capacity building in these communities can be attributed to the observed social capital and...

Concepts such as non‐place and placelessness can provide planners and designers with new insights to better capture the essence of place. This essay first reviews the literature of place and its byproducts, namely non‐place and placelessness. Against such a backdrop, the paper then explores how the contemporary transformation of the three component...

Linkages between social and the physical factors that influence the built environment have generated much debate in the field of urban planning. These linkages are multifaceted and this seminar explores them in a series of inter-related debates. Some of these debates or tensions include: social determinism versus physical determinism, social capita...

This article describes the experience of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI), a single revitalization program that has aimed to jump-start languishing downtown Los Angeles neighborhoods since 1994. This experience will be discussed against the backdrop of two putative public policy tensions: people versus place prosperity and needs versu...