Sense of place in the changing process of house form: Case studies from Ankara, Turkey

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the impact of typomorphological changes of residential environments on residents’ sense of place’. Seven housing developments representing different types introduced in Ankara, Turkey since the late 19th-century are selected as case studies. Their morphological characters at the building, street and neighbourhood scales are examined, and typological transformations among the cases in terms of the degrees of continuity are identified. The paper proposes a conceptual model consisting of ten indicators to assess sense of place at the building, street and neighbourhood scales of the residents of the seven cases. The scores of sense of place are generated through structured interviews with the residents and analysed in SPSS. The results show that sense of place is negatively affected by typomorphological changes over time, particularly when mutational changes occur. Continuity in typomorphological transformation helps to maintain sense of place at a desirable level. Furthermore, physical changes at the street and neighbourhood scales have larger impact on sense of place than that at the building scale. The research thus suggests that planning and design should be responsive to traditional types in residential development, particularly at the street and neighbourhood scales to maintain residents’ sense of place.

The visual quality of streets: A human-centred continuous measurement based on machine learning algorithms and street view images

“…It was also partly related to the 'sensuous qualities' or 'sense' of place by Kevin Lynch (Banerjee and Southworth, 1991). It mainly focuses on the visual impression amongst sense of place indictors discussed by Chen (2014) and Gokce and Chen (2018). When this concept is applied to streets, on the one hand, it reflects users' willingness to stay or use and enjoy the space in streets.…”

Sense of place in the process of changing the configuration and activity of rural housing types

“…From the selected samples according to the variables of space syntax, configuration information was collected by accurately interpreting the plans and activities of residents through structured interviews (Coolen 2008) with family mothers. Gokce and Chen (2017) ten-point questionnaire was also used to measure the sense of place to provide a complete picture of residents' spatial feelings about the housing in which they live. This methodology not only determines the impact of activity changes in housing types on sense of place, but also shows what characteristics of the activities and housing configuration of rural residents have changed.…”

“…One of these dimensions that has been emphasized a lot is spatial configuration (e.g. George & Campbell, 2000;Saraf & Ahlen, 2010;Gokce and Chen 2017). This dimension is also important in typological analyses and activities and can be used to identify changes in the built environment over time in social and cultural phenomena (Hillier, Hanson, and Garham 1987;Ahrentzen, Levine, and Michelson 1989;Monteiro 1997;Dalton and Bafna 2003;Wicker 2012;Chen and Thwaites 2013).…”

“…The results of their research showed that the weakness of the sense of place in Neinawa Street is due to the weakness in social and cultural activities and to provide a sense of place in the center of Mosul, they consider it necessary to restore these activities. Gokce and Chen (2017) report the effect of typomorphological changes of residential environments on residents' sense of place in three scales (neighborhood, street and house) in Ankara, Turkey. As a result of this study, the sense of place decreases over time through typo-morphological changes in the residential environment, especially when leaps and bounds occur.…”

What Do Local People Really Need from a Place? Defining Local Place Qualities with Assessment of Users’ Perceptions

“…Since the process of urban development does not effectively involve users' participation [4,5], a lack of a clear definition of what constitutes a "good" place becomes a consequence that is addressed by the local perspective, and thus becomes one of the main issues in current urban regenerations [6][7][8][9]. Various scholars have emphasized the importance of local context and socio-cultural influences based on the theory of place, from place image [10][11][12] and place identity [13,14], to place attachment [15,16], and sense of place [17][18][19][20], which address the value and meanings the place holds for local people.…”