Mekansal bilişim: Mekan dizim yönteminin Beyazıt, İstanbul kapsamında uygulanması

Designing cities depends upon how we conceived cites, in this regard focusing on the cognitive approach of urban spaces, which has an essential role in urban design, is necessary and undoubtedly determining factors that influence spatial cognition are important too. In this point of view this study preliminary illustrated the cognitive map of people about the area and spatial configuration of urban space through the case study of Beyazit area settled in the historical part of Istanbul. The aim is finding the answers of these questions: • What is the cognitive representation of people about Beyazit area? • Whether the syntactical properties of the area have a role in predicting the level of perceiving and memorability of the spaces or not? This study investigated spatial cognition of Beyazit area in association with syntactical attributes of it. In order to achieve the objectives, two research studies, cognitive mapping and space syntax analyzing, were performed in this study. Research findings were obtained by investigating the results from subjective and objective perspectives respectively. In the cognitive mapping process the technique of sketch mapping was utilized and additionally recognition task which is one of the cognitive mapping technique was done in order to underpin the results drew from analyzing the sketch maps. Also the spatial configuration of the area was analyzed through space syntax method and described syntactically by three spatial properties of integration, connectivity and intelligibility. Comparison of the findings drew from cognition and space syntax approaches enabled determination of whether the syntactical attributes of space are in association with cognitive representations or not. Overall, the results of the correlational study indicated that there is a positive association between cognitive representation and spatial configuration. In this context this thesis directs attentions to the cognition and space syntax approaches. Every chapter draws on issues relevant to these approaches, arguments about cognition started by defining of the spatial cognition. It refers to the knowledge, which is related to the thought process; these processes of gaining knowledge include, acquisition, storage, retrieval, manipulation and use of information gathered from the environment. According to Moore (1976), Spatial cognition sometimes has being seen as a subset of environmental cognition, which refers to the awareness, impressions, information, images, and beliefs that people have about the environments. Environmental cognition concerns the way we acquire, organize, store, and recall information about locations, distances, and arrangements in the physical environment. Perception is another term, which is common in cognitive studies and is often being used instead of environmental cognition to indicate the ability of human to comprehend, interpret, and evaluate the physical world that surrounds us. As Passini (1984), stated environmental perception is more related to 'sensory information', whereas environment cognition or recognition is considered, as 'memory information' therefore it can be stated that cognition is more intellectual than perception. Cognitive map is another notion, which is explicated as a mental representation of the world around us resulting from experience, direct and indirect learning, and knowledge integration and processing. In reality, researchers in different fields may use different terms such as mental maps, mental image, and mental pictures, which have the same meaning as cognitive maps. Nonetheless many different arguments point to the mental image, all of them have common idea that mental image is a by-product of thinking and it is an important component of cognition. Lynch's arguments about mental image points to this fact that mental image is formed in the process of perceiving environment, he named it as legibility. Lynch (1960), examined legibility of the city use of mental maps; he found that there are five physical elements (paths, landmarks, districts, nodes, edges), which have important role in creating legible place. There is variety of techniques to apprehend the cognitive map which sketch mapping is one which is developed by Lynch. Another approach, which was utilized in this study, is space syntax. The review of the theory on space syntax and the relevant issues provides an essential starting point for the research, this session discussed about the term of spatial configuration, defined it as spatial relations taking into account other relations, further more in order to generate a field for a practical study through space syntax methodology, it investigate the explanation of syntactical properties of the urban layout. The chapter that follows take up with exploring relation between space syntax and cognition and reviewing previous studies about this issue in order to find the common area for these two approaches; for example understanding and readably of the cites were argued by noted the term of legibility from cognition perspective and intelligibility form space syntax perspective. Finally in the last chapter the whole procedure for dealing with data collection and analyzing them was explained. The results drew from inferring the cognitive maps were inverted to the quantitative data in order to execute correlational study. The comparison of the scores obtained from cognitive mapping and space syntax analyses enabled the determination the relationship between the routes' scores from cognitive mapping and their syntactic values in the present map, which are the base research issues. In the light of formal measures derived from space syntax, the research findings recapitulate that there is a positive correlation between spatial configuration of Beyazit urban area with the degree of memorability of spaces, and it would be possible to predict the degree of memorability of the spaces according to their syntactic values.