Swallowed by the urbanization: Spatial evolution of Adana Bağlarbaşı District

Abstract

Vineyard (Turkish: bağ) culture is a common urban phenomenon in Çukurova region communities, which have strong ties with the land, due to the favorable climate and soil conditions. Adana's historic city center and some of the vineyard settlements to the north of this area lost their rural settlement characteristic and started to be built up as a result of Hermann Jansen's planning studies that started in the 1930s, and the city continued its development as planned towards the vineyard settlements (Turkish: bağlar) to the north. Although Gazipaşa, Ziyapaşa, and Namık Kemal Neighborhoods, which were examined within the scope of the study, were planned as a result of these planning studies, they were not built according to the plan. Thus, the implemented part of the Jansen Plan was defined by the railway line located to the south of these three neighborhoods. As a result, these three neighborhoods turned into an area where vineyards began on the periphery of the planned built-up areas and became known as Bağlarbaşı (starts of vineyard area). The aim of the study is to make a morphological analysis of the transformation of the three neighborhoods formed in the area where the vineyards, which previously had a rural settlement texture, disappeared as a result of the urbanization pressure that started in the 1950s, starting from 1950 to the present day, and to examine the process dynamics and to determine the general characteristics of the vineyard culture and houses in the study area. In the study area, morphological analyses were carried out by comparing aerial photographs from 1950, 1954, 1961, current maps from 1985 and 2019, zoning plans dated 1940, 1969 and current data. In addition, the transformation was documented with photographs from various archives and oral history research was utilized. Two vineyard houses in the area were surveyed to determine their spatial characteristics. The data obtained through the studies coincide with Marcel Poëte's assertion that "the memory of a city survives in the physical structure of that city". It has been determined that today's parcel boundaries, main roads, and streets, physical formations such as thresholds and reinforcements of the three neighborhoods bear traces of the period when the neighborhoods were vineyards and gardens. In the area, a small number of vineyard houses (cottages), which are in parallel with the typological characteristics of the traditional Turkish House, have survived to the present day, albeit in ruins.