Fahriye Hazer Sancar

Children's Places: Rural–Urban Comparisons Using Participatory Photography in the Bodrum Peninsula, Turkey

Urban place-making requires an understanding of experiences and meanings ordinary people associate with common environments—meanings that often go back to their childhoods. This paper investigates how childrens place preferences and the attributes of these places differ along a rural-urban continuum. Participatory photography was used with four groups of children (ages 9–11) living in three different municipalities of the Bodrum peninsula, Turkey—a region that has experienced major transformation over the past three decades due to tourism. The research reported here was part of planning and urban design studios during the summers of 2005–2007, and the results were integrated with the projects and presented to the public. The particular municipalities where the children resided vary in tourism-based urbanization and the associated socio-economic and environmental characteristics. In all cases, the children valued experiencing nature, being in contact with people and having diversity and freedom in their environments. Although all four of these factors are essential for producing healthy, loved and sustainable communities, it was also observed that as traditional landscapes are replaced by spaces of tourism and consumption, the specific attributes of childrens preferred places change, as does the diversity of place types and experiences, and children have less freedom to explore independently. These changes have implications for peoples attachment to places and ought to be considered by planners and urban designers as well as public officials who are responsible for guiding redevelopment in areas undergoing rapid change.

Paradigms of Postmodernity and Implications for Planning and Design Review Processes

Social discourse regarding design issues evolves in the contexts of the scholarly arena, the city hall, the courts, the public media, and the use/action realm or everyday life. Design review, narrowly conceived, is one of the formal mechanisms within the broader context of this social discourse. In this conception, the impact of design review on the physical environment is direct and immediate but specific and limited in scope. Altematively, it can also be considered as a generic process encompassing any or all instances of collective and critical reflection on design issues. These diverse processes may appear to lack coherence, but they have a much more fundamental and lasting effect because they shape the tacit assumptions and beliefs underlying our more direct actions. Here the broader context of design review will be considered. Following a discussion of the spatial scene, the evolution of three constructs during the past three decades-place, sustainability, and participation-into full-blown paradigms is summarized. It is shown that the three together are converging into a worldview that is taking hold globally. This emerging worldview, then, provides the grounds and the backing for substantive and procedural discussion of planning and design review.

Behavioural knowledge integration in the design studio: an experimental evaluation of three strategies

Abstract This study addresses the difficulties in design education regarding scientific knowledge generation and its application in the design studio by investigating the effects of particular design approaches on the integration of sociobehavioural scientific information by design students. The investigation involved the systematic assignment of the students to one of three treatments representing alternative design approaches and assessment of the effects of these treatments on the quality of their design products in terms of knowledge integration. The three treatments approximate the major methodological approaches that are debated in the literature. They differ in their assumptions on the nature of the design process, the form of knowledge, and the type of information representation. The results support the main hypothesis that a treatment corresponding to the integrative/ generative strategy, in which ‘tyle’ (a form image, combinatorial rules and a theoretical framework) serves as a primary generator, is superior to a listing of empirical information generated by an external source. Given the discussion in the literature on the design process and cognition and the results of this study, it is possible to state that the applicability gap is expected to diminish to the extent that the form of knowledge embodied in ‘style’ is explicitly linked to the development of scientific knowledge.

City, Music and Place Attachment: Beloved Istanbul

This paper discusses the role of music in establishing and expressing place attachment based on a study of Istanbul songs in Turkish classical music, from 1700 to the present. Istanbul songs are about fortunate people who participate in a way of life made possible by the beauty of the city. The study identifies four themes: excursion, romance, persona and panegyric. In all four themes, the place or the setting is significant and essential. Music gives emotional life to the place, becomes memorable and is passed from one generation to the next, celebrating the city. What generates peoples attachment are the intimate connections between particular places in the city that are maintained through the publics engagement in the activities depicted in these themes. The way of life and social conduct change through time, as the city itself changes to accommodate the masses, and yet, they retain the essences of excursion, romance, persona and panegyric told in the songs. These songs are a testimony to the excepti...

Designerly Argumentation in Boulder, Colorado

This paper argues that postmodern planning favours increasing informalization of traditional controls over land use and building whereby planning and design strategies are reconstructed and reinterpreted by means of a high level of communication among the stakeholders. In such an environment, significant issues are the integration of planning and design, the effectiveness of communication, and the role of designerly argumentation in development review. This study looks at the city of Boulder, Colorado, where the worldview and the emergent review processes show the dominant characteristics associated with postmodernity. The administrative structure of development review in Boulder, Colorado is discussed and the interaction that takes place in the review processes is analysed. The level of discretion used by the parties, the nature of the communication, the role of middle-scale plans, and the level of design argumentation are described. Finally, problems expressed by the reviewers and new strategies that are currently being tested are considered.

System Dynamics Simulation of Spatial Character

System Dynamics modeling has been applied to regional, urban, and community problem solving where critical policies are concerned with land-use controls. Representation of change in the spatial distribution and physical appearances of various activities have traditionally been achieved by modeling these as transfers between relatively homogeneous sub-area sectors. Due to lack of capabilities for direct representation of physical space showing the distribution and appearances of activities over geographic space, System Dynamics modeling has received little attention in environmental and city planning practice. In this paper, we describe the main components of a methodology to make the System Dynamics modeling more integral in planning and design for community development, also including spatial representation.