CONTEXUALISM, as an approach in Urban Planning, holds that the urban elements are not valued in themselves, and should be apprehended, processed, and constructed in its total context and historical setting. This approach moved beyond the physical aspects of elements in their context, and throughout humanistic approach, the relevant studies developed into socio-cultural areas. The contexualists should recognise the urban elements and ideas, to apply them into the processes of Urban Planning. Involving in these processes, this study reconstructed three major contexts out of a literature review:1) Physical Context deals with the existing elements of urban form.2) Historical Context concerns the historic order of the urban elements for inspiration.3) Socio-cultural Context referred to the shared important norms and values of the society as well as the meanings embodied in the elements of urban forms.Focusing on these 3 different contexts produced different interpretations on CONTEXUALISM. This study is an attempt to address the terminology, theoretical assumptions, principles and design processes of the attitudes and to raise an accent over their applications within the contemporary Urban Planning.

Vernacular architecture has increasingly absorbed the attention of architectural communities in recent decades. Finding a common feature including all historical and geographical varieties of vernacular architecture will improve the recognition of this kind of architecture. On the other hand, context and contextualism in architecture is a multidimensional tendency and all the different architectures have made their own benefits from that. In this survey, vernacular architecture contextualization has been studied, around this main question that how much vernacular architecture is related to contextualism in different aspects of the context. In this article using the descriptive-analytical method, different definitions and aspects of vernacular architecture presented by specialists have been scrutinized and contextualistically reconsidered to make a clear-cut understanding of the relationship between vernacular architecture and contextualism. The analysis of written resources regarding vernacular architecture in this survey highlights the tendency of the writers to different aspects of the context. It should be mentioned that contextuality is a relative value and it can be measured in case of comparing official architecture with vernacular, the two which are considered opposites.