Urban image: Findings from Istanbul

Abstract

A field study of the environmental perception is acknowledged as a valuable tool for registering the human interaction with the built environment and surrounding open spaces. Perceived images of the city plays an important role in the understanding of urban environment, helps to way-finding and orientation, gives people experiences and increases environmental quality. On theoretical grounds, this concentration of inquiry would be positioned under 'image studies'. In the study a perceptual analysis of Istanbul has been carried out in order to obtain deeper contextual information about the environment and to use this information to enhance the issuing of design strategies. The data was collected by a survey and trained interviewers administered a total of 280 questionnaires, to randomly selected respondents. The study was limited to the people who lived in planned areas, who were at least high school graduates, and had lived in Istanbul for more than five years. Two major representative groups were chosen, people, who lived in the central districts and people, who lived in peripheral districts. Two strategies were employed for gathering information: People were invited to verbalize their perception by answering the questionnaires and people were asked to make drawings according to the mental images they carried about the environment. They were asked to draw a map indicating the location of most important places, buildings, districts, roads and boundaries. The results of this research were shown similarity of general results of image studies that were nodes and paths, were generally perceived in high intensity level. In the research work, it was also found that the perceived image elements were located in city center, the level of perceptional intensity decreased outside of the city center.

Özet

Yapısal çevresinin algılanması insan ve çevre ilişkilerinin incelenmesinde önemli bir araç olarak kabul edilmektedir. Çevresel algı kentsel çevrenin anlaşılması ve değerlendirilmesinde önemli bir rol oynar, yol ve yön bulmaya yardımcı olur, yönelme sağlar, deneyim kazandırır ve çevresel kalitenin artırılmasına katkıda bulunur. Kişilerin çevrelerini ne şekilde algıladıklanyla ilgili araştırma sonuçları kentsel tasarım politikalarının geliştirilmesinde kullanılmaktadır. Bu çalışma, istanbul için algısal imge ile ilgili bilgi toplama ve sonuçların tasarım sürecinde kullanılmasını sağlamak amacıyla gerçekleştirilmiştir. Çalışmada deneyimli anketçilerle rasgele olarak gerçekleştirilen 280 anket değerlendirilmiştir. Görüşülenlerden aynı zamanda toplanma alanları, sıra dışı yapılar ve yöreler, önemli akslar ve sınırları işaretleyebilecekleri bir harita çizmeleri de istenmiştir. Araştırmanın sonuçları tasarım kararlarının geliştirilmesinde kullanılmak amacıyla değerlendirilmektedir.