An Applicable Framework for the Regeneration Process of Historic City Centres: Learning from the Mediterranean

Cities are like living organisms, which are exposed to transformations as a result of changing needs and requirements. City centres are one of the attractive, essential, and vital parts of the city that are also affected by these changes. Specifically, historic city centres, which refer to the origins of the city, will be discussed within this context. Urban design aims to shape our cities with better quality and provide better places for everyday life. The proposed research which argues that, urban regeneration can be utilized as a generic public policy for solving problems and providing physical improvements for these cities. Although the problems that emerge in each city are similar, sometimes they change circumstantially. As a result, the planning, implementation, and management of urban regeneration projects as well as their sustainability can produce serious complications. This research focuses on the process of urban regeneration, historic city centres, and the Mediterranean region and aims to develop an applicable regeneration framework for historic city centres learning from the Mediterranean region. The methodology of the overall research presented in this study is mainly based on a critical review of primary and secondary documents from the literature through a comparative and exploratory approach. Through documentary studies, examining and analysis of existing examples, observations of an on-site example and interview surveys, the research is organized in four main parts. The first part gives an overview of sustainability, the concept of urban regeneration and characteristics of historic city centres and their relationships. The second part examines successful urban transformation examples in the selected European and Middle Eastern cities in the Mediterranean region – which is selected as the learning environment for this thesis and their approaches to city centre regeneration in their historic centres. In the third part, an applicable urban regeneration framework for historic city centres, developed by the author, is explained with the goal to reduce social segregation while incorporating the contributions of views from both local inhabitants and stakeholders in the process. Finally, the last part presents the results from this research and gives future recommendations for upcoming studies related with historic city centres. The main objective is to extract a set of lessons which can be useful to the historic cities which are pursuing problems especially in the Mediterranean region. The expected output of this research is a set of policies and strategies with ‘framework’ for the historic city centres considering sustainability with a holistic approaches that would pave the way for other applications. Keywords: Sustainability, Urban Regeneration, Regeneration Process, Framework, Historic City Centre, Mediterranean