Current World Environment

Nowadays in countries with long history and civilization most of factors that distinguish the historical city is available in the form of physical identity. It always absorbs significant attention of urban planners, residents and visitors and quality of life. It has played an important role in quality of next generation. The objective of this research is to investigate and analysis the components of the city's physical identity in Iranian cities such as Isfahan, Shiraz and Yazd and capabilities of that historical urban identity in field of natural artifact and human factors. Research method is descriptive-analytical with qualitative and quantities approach to recognize and prioritize the factor using AHP analytical hierarchical process that  provides a comprehensive and rational framework for structuring a decision problem, for representing and quantifying the Iranian cities , for relating those elements to physical identities, and for evaluating them. This applied study has a descriptive-analytical basis with a population of 30 experts in urban planning and citizens and local people completed 120 questionnaires. Cultural matters and academic staff used as participants. First, the quality physical identity was determined based on the 3 main criteria and 15 sub-criteria in a hierarchical tree. Then experts were asked to score the major and minor criteria and specify their priorities based on paired comparisons. Applying the Expert Choice, which implements the AHP, the weights of each criterion and sub-criterion were estimated respectively. Finally, according to the Iranian urban identity were described. The results obtained showed that the artifact factor, weighting 0.614, got the first priority and it was followed by natural (0.268), and human (0.117) criteria, which got the second to the third rank.