Socio-cultural and physical analysis of Ayazağa district

The city is considered as the habitat of human society, heavily inhabited by settlements, resulting from the interrelations of social, cultural and economic forces. The buildings used for different purposes consisting of a large number of economic, social and cultural activities and a collection of outdoor activities consist in the city. This complex constitution serves the biological, social and psychological entity called the individual or the user.The concept of space has been the subject of plenty of researches in the field of architecture. Space accommodates various actions of individuals or societies not only as a physical entity but as entagled relationships of culture and way of life of societies. It contains information about the differences and changes in social structures, attitudes and meanings. Societies have their own unique characteristics which transpire from their particular location and spatial organizations in spatial systems. Every society expresses itself in a unique spatial pattern. From the scale of settlement, the scale of the building to house, street, square, rooms, halls, cultures show differences due to value-laden principles of organization and meanings.Places which are subsystems of the city, created by the users, are congruent with the structures of socio-cultural and physical factors. In this study, a sample is determined in the Ayazaga District, Sarıyer, İstanbul, a residential area, and the people as well as the spatial organization of that residential area are studied from the aspects of physical environment and socio-cultural structure so as to determine the role of the social structure.on house type choice. Survey to determine the social structures of the households consisted of questionnaire and interviews. The spatial assessments were made by the method of space syntax analysis.Socio-economic factors which were used to explain the organization of the existing residential subjects were users' income, age, education, gender, etc. A series of questions to decipher their use of space, habits, neighbourly relations, satisfaction with their neighbourhood, their likes and dislikes about their surroundings, etc were directed to subjects and the properties of the users were determined. Most importantly the research disclosed that the houses this particular population built for themselves reflected their tradional houses and values, habits and likes associated with them.