Maremat & Me'mari-e Iran

Bazaar of Tehran, once a commercial marketplace and the heart of the city during the Qajar era, still remains Tehran’s leading commercial center in spite of the changes that have been made to its Corporal and functional character. There are various functional and Corporal qualities in this historic bazaar that could as yet be discovered, provided that these qualities are surveyed and classified to achieve a better understanding about this bazaar and its durability in terms of Corporal and functional aspects. In addition to the Corporal and functional durability, the historical and cultural values are esteemed very significantly in relation to the conservation of the objective and conceptual reality belonging to Tehran’s historic bazaar. The aim of this study, therefore, is to assess the attitudes of the local community merchants in the historic bazaar of Tehran concerning the market and the conservation processes; this has to be done in a manner with which we could not only develop a new classification of various Corporal and functional qualities besides the historical and cultural values in this bazaar, but also could discover the reasons for these variations. Hence, the tradespeople were interviewed about their opinions of the underlying causes of the lack of durability in certain domains and regions so that we could arrive at better decisions while getting the historic bazaars prepared to be conserved. The methodology of this study is based on the attitude measurement research through questionnaires. According to the results of the interview surveys, the most significant causes of the current lacking Corporal and functional qualities of Tehran’s historic bazaar could be outlined as: the decrease in the sense of belonging to the Bazaar among the traders, the heightened inclinations towards the renovation in sense of substituting the conventional traditional qualities with the modernized types of elements, the diminishing partnership of the merchants in conservation actions which is resulted from the lack of the working knowledge in the conservational processes, the decline in the tendencies among the traders to continue the cultural qualities of Bazaar as its conventional tradition, reduction in the level of overall satisfaction among the merchants whose workplaces are either situated in the non-intervened parts of Bazaar, or in the places where the interventions have been a mixture of authentic and rudimentary actions, and at last, to the contrary to what has been stated, the satisfaction of those who work in the renewed and modernized parts of the structure of Bazaar.