Reflections of the structural changes in traditional houses in the city of Bartin, on the garden places and plant materials used

Traditional settlements, which are important historical, cultural and structural heritages of societies, got further away from their distinctive identities and gained different identities in recent years, as a result of the effect of modernization. Cities are losing their distinctive identities due to the studies that began to gradually be a standard and that cause to formation of uniform cities. For ensuring a city to maintain its distinctive tissue, it is not adequate to protect only the examples of its existing traditional civil architecture. Environmental components that constitute the urban tissue should be dealt with and evaluated as a whole. Gardens, which are the first open places providing the link between houses and external environment, give clues about the worldviews, beliefs, traditions, social orders, ways of making living, and organizations of the communities that they belong to, i.e. cultures of communities as a whole, and their development; and at the same time, they play an important role in enabling a city to take shape and create an identity, by accompanying the architectural models with their great number of domestic and exotic plant species compatible with the city's tissue. Within the scope of this research, five different regions were determined in Bartin's city center, where the traditional residential tissue is intense; and then, the questionnaire study was performed in the house gardens selected in that area with the random sampling method. By means of the evaluation of the questionnaire results, the reflections of the preferences of the dwellers of traditional houses—regarding their gardens as well as their socio-economic characteristics—on their gardens were revealed; and the wood-like plant species in the house gardens shaped based on such specifications were examined. Floristic diversity in traditional house gardens, and how a change this diversity exhibits were determined. In addition, the preferences regarding the floristic diversity found in the house gardens were introduced, according to their use in urban landscape, and their contributions to urban landscape design were emphasized.