Evaluation and conservation of the memoryscapes in the context of memory-space relations: Muğla Menteşe urban historic fabric

Urban cultural heritage sites where physical layers, evolving and transforming in a historical process, exist together and gain meaning within the inhabitants' experiences, memories, common pasts, stories and identity. These sites where each layer forms with the interaction in between the users, by shaping its own temporal and spatial context, change in time by the sharp and destructive interventions. These changes, resulting in the disconnection with the people and urban space, cause the loss in the meaning and context of cultural heritage sites. In order to that, it is difficult to produce conservation approach which ensures the connection of physical and intangible data by evaluating the context integratively in cultural heritage sites, involving social, economic, physical and historical information. In this context, the main aim of the thesis, based upon the information that memory is a spatial-coded data, to emphasize that cultural heritage should be a constituent of 'place' with its all items and a source of daily life without breaking the social context; to integrate the memory to the spatial data in order to make the cultural heritage sites sustain in the cultural and physical context; to propose a holistic approach that will make the information obtained from the research utilized in the formulation of conservation principles. The case study of the thesis, Muğla city Menteşe township urban historic fabric and near environment is a place where the production of meaning, memory and place attachment still continue for the inhabitants; despite of the breaking points in the historical continuity of the city. The data about memory gathered from the in-depth interviews of inhabitants and the data of physical features include the dynamics which cannot be associated with each other in the same plane. The creative mapping, utilized in the thesis, enables to create the information basis by making these dynamics visible through making analysis and evaluations. Therefore, by the integration of these data, both the general frame for the conservation of the cultural heritage sites in the urban historic fabrics and the conservation principles and strategies special to historic urban fabric for Muğla Menteşe are identified.