Interpretation of urban data in the complex pattern of traditional city: The case of Amasya

Abstract

Traditional cities are complex organic systems which have many forms and structures affecting each other spontaneously through time. Today, uncontrolled urbanization activities destroy the wholeness of these organic patterned structures and destroy their local character by top-down planning decisions and designers' personal motives. Thus, for enhancing the continuity in traditional urban patterns, understanding the inner nature of urban patterns is crucial. In this context, the aim of the proposed method is to deal with the huge number of raw data coming from complex traditional cities and analyze them with computational techniques in order to let designers create some basic rules and understanding in terms of the spatial organization of city structures in the early phase of urban design process. These rules can give clues about the essence of the city and guide designers and authorities for better integrated designs with traditional patterns not only in their physical form but also in the social, economic and cultural context. In this sense, the proposed method offers Data Mining algorithms in terms of knowledge discovery in the urban database with the help of Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies.