The residents’ ‘images of the past’ in the architecture of Salt City, Jordan

In the preservation movement, the perception of older buildings by the residents of a city has received limited consideration. This paper reports on empirical research conducted in a small traditional city, Salt, Jordan. It examines ‘images of the past’ within a model of nonverbal communication of the meaning in the built environment. The objective of this study is to identify similarities among residents’ images of the past. A survey research design using multiple sorting techniques with open-ended questions was used to identify residents’ images of the past. These images were elicited through the observation of coloured photographs of a sample of older buildings from the city centre. Images of the past were examined within three content areas: knowledge of the past, date of construction of the building, and character of the past of Salt City. Findings suggest that older buildings in the centre of the city do evoke similar images of the past for residents, regardless of their length of residential tenure. From these similar images, a common image of the past focus on public or social use buildings along with residential buildings of the settlement era. Residents has associated these buildings with the past functions and development of the city. This study presents an approach for operationalizing the image of the past as a research variable (in terms of the scale of a city and of different cultures).