Investigation of spatial characteristics of shopping streets: The case of İnonu Street and its surroundings, Malatya

The rate of urbanization has been increasing rapidly in recent years, and with this increase, the physical and functional forms of cities are constantly changing. Changing spatial structures in cities once created generally requires high costs and is practically impossible. Therefore, for the physical and functional analysis of cities, it is necessary to examine urban areas within the framework of certain spatial parameters. Main streets, in particular, play an important role in connecting different regions and form the backbone of the city. This study aims to analyze İnönü Street, one of the busiest and busiest streets of Malatya city center, and its immediate surroundings in terms of spatial character parameters. The space syntax method was used to determine spatial features. In this context, integration, selection and connection analyzes were carried out for the study area with the space syntax method at global scale (Rn) and local scale (R2000-R500). Using the results of these analyses, the intelligibility, accessibility and synergy features of the study area were determined. The analysis results show that the integration values of İnönü Street are high on a global scale, but low on a local scale. This difference in local and global integration negatively affects the synergy between urban areas. In terms of readability, the study area has a high intelligibility level on a global scale, while the readability level is low on a local scale. While the spatial characteristics of İnönü Street are quite high, the spatial characteristics of the other regions forming the study area are found to be low. This shows that the road hierarchy is unbalanced and İnönü Street is more preferred than other streets. As a result, it was determined that the usage of İnönü Street increased and the preference rates of other streets within the study area decreased, thus creating an unbalanced usage situation.