Cultural Influences on Architecture by Koç Gülşah

Author:Koç Gülşah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Information Science Reference
Published: 2020-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Although the topic of urban infrastructure was of little interest for researchers and professionals in urbanism, one of the remarkable publications was “The Image of the City” by Lynch (1960). The idea came from structuring environment as a human mental capacity, so the mental map of a city is produced through symbolic classification and extraction of information relevant for human existence. Lynch connected imageability of a city as an integrated physical setting with three domains: identity, structure, and meaning. The ease of recognizing the patterns and meanings underlining the environment influences urban planning. In other words, a city composition is connected with a place. A clear and structured image of the city settles balanced relations between city and resident.

Thus visual characteristics became vitally important by the 1980s. Sloterdijk (1998, 1999, 2004) refuses the exclusively temporal register in urban studies, reinterpreting Western urbanization as a spatial project from what he describes as micro-sphere (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) and plurality of mezzo-sphere (foam). The analogy of foam is used to describe the interrelations between individuals in which each is co-isolated in the context of the modern city. Our behaviour dictated by habits as humans, in co-production with the framing of our urban location and mobility, determines the arrangement of a network of isolated, bubble-like cells (see Frichot, 2009; Klauser, 2010).

Changes arrived in the 1980s when it became more vivid to search for understanding how cities function and how to accelerate their development. As Foucault (1984) highlighted, the organization of a city is equally conceived with a collective infrastructure. Therefore, collectivity is an underline of a city space. Later, the analysis of the city infrastructure came to the concept of division between physical and social network as was done by Herman and Ausubel (1988). They emphasized a symbolic character of the social infrastructure. Symbolic forms and functions sharpen our understanding of the similarities and differences among regions, groups, and cultures (Herman & Ausubel, 1988). In fact, such a close attention to a space inhabited by humans meant what we consider the ‘spatial turn’.

In the beginning of the 1990s, the essentialist approach had been removed by relativism. Urbanism was defined through the process and flows. Fluidity and networking have become the core characteristics of the modern urban space (Dupuy, 1991; Kostof, 1992; Beaverstock, 2002). And Thrift (2009) and Pile (2000) mentioned social and cultural pillows in space and spatiality representation, as well as being quasi-material, productions. Another trend in urban development is diversification and attention to a dispersal character of the urban space construction. It could be traced through enclavization by streets. As it was mentioned by Graham and Marvin (2001), streets act as entry points to 'gated' or 'master planned' communities. They coined the notion of the networked infrastructure – transportation, telecommunications, energy, water, and streets. At their core, infrastructure networks are assumed to be integrators of multilayered urban spaces. They bind cities, regions and sociality into functioning geographical and political entities.

Urban space described as the development of the city

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