Evaluation of Urban Images: The Case of Adana

Abstract

The image 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 sociology and history 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 depending on its historical background, industrialization, and development process. In the study, the historical and new architectural images on the banks of the Seyhan River, which is an important historical, economic and sociological region of the city, were examined with an aim to question how the images related to Adana were interpreted by the public. In line with this objective, the data obtained from photo archives, survey techniques, and the results of statistical analysis performed using the SPSS software package were analyzed together to question the architectural image components. Within this framework, conducted with 60 individuals, 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 have been the most influential factors that make up the imaginative value due to their traces in urban memory. Therefore, the present study and similar studies 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.