Evaluation of Urban Images: The Case of Adana

The need of people, who began to form the artificial environment while shaping nature, to understand, shape, and interact with the environment has increased with the process of visual perception-interpretation-definition. Objective information perceived from the environment creates different effects on people. Mental schemas shared by cultural group members lead to the emergence of visible patterns and orders in culture. This situation occasionally causes intersections in the visual elements, which common meanings are attributed to, in the perceptual cognition of the individuals using the physical environment. The image taking shape as a result of intersections is a formation of momentary perceptions, past experiences, and memories. From this point of view, the perception of images is not merely visual; it has sociological and historical aspects that it represents. In this context, the city of Adana, which has a multicultural history of 8000 years, hosts a wide variety of elements in terms of architectural imagery. In the study, the historical and new architectural images on the banks of the Seyhan River were interpreted by the public. In line with this objective, the data obtained by using photo archives, the statistical results obtained from surveys were analyzed in order to question the architectural image components. Within this framework, with the survey conducted of 60 people, the followings were questioned and answers were sought for the city users: - Primary images of the city, - The reasons that have created the images, in other words, the values that have been effective in transforming these buildings into images, - The reasons for the differentiation of the selected historical and new images in their imagery values. The results of the statistical analyses revealed that the urban element/building that has not been utilized actively could not establish the relationship of belonging with urbanites, therefore, the building's imaginative effect has been weakened, and particularly the historical buildings that make up their traces in urban memory have been the most influential factors. In this context, the present study and similar studies in order to protect on retaining urbanites' relationship with the residential areas are considered valuable in terms of both shedding light on future studies and using them as data in the practices.

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