What follows is a brief description of a research project on the subjective dimensions of public spaces as shaped through the imagination of the youth in Iran. I asked the students of a high school in Tehran, all girls between 14 and 17, to describe their imagination of public and semi-public spaces. The research was divided into three parts. In the first and second part of the research, students were asked to talk about their imagination of public spaces in general. It was only during the last phase of the research that we started to look for clear significations and descriptions of the word "public space."

During the first part of the study the students talked about their feelings, such as fairness, happiness, nuisance, and some problems they had with public spaces such as parks, restaurants, sidewalks, etc. The results of these discussions led me to sketch the first questionnaire.

In this questionnaire students were asked to classify and distinguish public and semi-public spaces. They used different words for describing each space. For example most of them used the word boyfriend for cafes and family for restaurants. Keywords as such led me again to the second part of the research trying to find some keywords for each space. So I sketched another questionnaire leading the students to the most important words related to their mental image of each public space. It became clear, for example, that cultural centers have no common output for them, cinemas were described as definitely different from theaters and also the park near their house is seen as completely different from the parks farther away from their homes. They used keywords like happiness, calm and peace for the parks in their neighborhood and keywords like fear, make up, etc. for parks farther away.

During this exercise, they addressed spaces like shopping centers, cinemas, cultural centers, cafes, restaurants, parks, sports fields and streets. Besides these common public spaces, students were interested in talking about some ideal spaces, spaces without restrictions and limitations. They found them in chartrooms and web logs. Despite the fact that they talked about virtual space as an ideal space, they preferred to search for places in the city where they could talk to their friends and experience new relations…

The third part of the research contained a few brainstorming sessions. Each session was concerned with the present and with the ideal public spaces.

The words provided by the students during these sessions are dividable into two main groups. The first group includes words expressing the students’ feelings in relation to the existing public spaces. It seemed that the structure and the form of the city do not sufficiently convince the students. They depict the city as a colorless (gray) world, which bewilders them because of the lack of sufficient information, leaving them with a feeling of insecurity. The similarity of the streets, lack of street signs, the identical squares and the narrow pavements contribute to this feeling of insecurity. The students placed words such as street, main road, pavement and square next to words such as boring, soulless, artificial, inharmonious and horrible.

The second group of words described ideal public spaces. These were words like freedom, music, color, dance, flower, systematic, well-ordered, honesty, harmless and silence. Within this same group the students also mentioned words that introduce new kinds of public spaces; those of ceremonies, rituals and especial events shared by Iranians at different times or occasions during the year. Students referred to words such as Norouz (Iranian New Year, March 21), Moharram (a religious month with special mourning days in Shiite Moslem societies), fireworks and football celebrations when describing public spaces. These words do not signify permanent physical spaces but allude to temporal intervals into public spaces. People’s dancing and feasting during the victories of the national football-team, the public feast of Charshanbe-soury (celebrating the last Tuesday of the year in the streets), the feast of Norouz and the mourning of Moharram are activities which take place more or less identically in the whole country. It seems that while there are no places for these gatherings and collective activities, they would however embody a place not in the physical but in the mental world, creating temporary public spaces. In fact when (some of the) physical public spaces are eliminated or no permanent access is possible to them, people satisfy their needs by creating mental images and commemorate them at any possible opportunity; people’s need for a place for dancing and feasting for example, becomes satisfied by pouring into the streets under the pretext of any success in sport in the same way that they satisfy their needs for a place for gathering by taking part in the religious mourning rituals (independent of the degree of their belief in them). It is in this way that the lack of specific places will be compensated by replacements, which are temporal intervals in public spaces.