Kentsel eskime: Gözlemlenen ve algılanan ölçütlerin Ankara tarihi kent merkezi Ulus bağlamında değerlendirilmesi

Ulus, the historic city center of Ankara, has been experiencing a steady urban obsolescence process, which threatens the cultural values inherited from prehistoric civilizations to the early republican period and the ongoing urban life in the quarter. Although there are many concepts in the literature that defines urban depression in cities, such as urban decline, blight, and shrinkage, they all have nuances in their theoretical background in terms of causes and effects. In the case of Ankara city and Ulus historic city center, the process of urban depression occurred in a rather different socio-economic pattern than the urban decline processes in modern capitalist cities. For this reason, in this study, the concept of urban obsolescence was applied to identify the problems of Ulus. The problems that historic city centers faced is a long-discussed subject in the academic field especially with the aspects of causes and prevention. There are generally accepted transformation approaches such as revitalization for preserving the assets of these areas while providing a function as a dynamic part of the cities. However, it is recognized that these activities cannot eventuate as successfully as desired in Turkish cities. It is assumed that one of the many reasons behind this situation can be the top-down and expert-based practices in the planning system. In this study, it is hypothesized that there might be important differences between the observation of experts and the evaluations of users. In the light of this assumption, an urban obsolescence identification method is formulated to test whether there are remarkable differences between the analyses of an expert from the profession and academy and the evaluations of users of historic quarters.