A successful relationship between users and public spaces is built on main five values: satisfaction with the pedestrian zone, encouragement of social interaction and privacy, the quality of public services, the environmental conditions, and the visual quality. This paper aims to examine these values in the current design of one of the prominent public spaces in the historic center of Nablus City: En-Naser Square, following its recent rehabilitation in order to propose it as a pilot project for the rehabilitation of public spaces in historic centers of Palestine. Two methods are used in this analysis: the historic method, through which the authors detailed the architectural development of the square across several historic eras, and developed the hypothesis of the paper: the shared square-character enhances the successful public space. The second method is an empirical study, which was conducted to examine the compatibility of the current square design with the mentioned five values and verify the paper’s hypothesis. The survey has revealed that the square has good response to the five values if some issues of public services were solved. Users were satisfied with most of interventions in the square, which led to conclude that historic squares in Palestine can reflect a successful relationship between users and public space with minimum interventions. Thus there is a need for enhancing pedestrian comfort in historic centers for the creation of more successful public spaces in Palestine with the reference to En-Naser Square project.

Title

Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Publisher Country

United Kingdom

Indexing

Scopus

Impact Factor

0.904

Publication Type

Both (Printed and Online)

Volume

--

Year

2023

Pages

--