City image in children's mental maps: a study of Ortahisar, Trabzon

The city is a critical environment for children's physical and mental development, and it is generally defined as paths, edges, nodes, districts and landmarks. These notions constitute the city image in total. Due to the improper and uncontrolled cities' growth, children's interactions with space have been limited. The study aims to determine the perceptual approaches of children and measure their interaction with the social, natural and historical environments. The research area covers Ortahisar, Trabzon. The methodology part includes a verbal and mental mapping survey. First, the research area was physically divided into six parts to achieve equal contribution from the participants. Next, one secondary school was selected from each part. Then, a qualitative (256 participants) and a mental mapping survey (192 participants) were conducted with 10-12 age groups. The data were analysed through MAXQDA 2020 Analytics Pro program. In addition, Jaccard similarity index was performed in the surveys to control the survey reliability. The average similarity value was detected as 91.23% (qualitative) and 54.80% (mental mapping). According to findings, girls' image was more dominant than boys. Moreover, children born and grew up in Trabzon presented more images compared with the others. As for city elements, whereas nodes' frequency was dominant in the qualitative survey, landmarks had density in mapping outputs. Furthermore, a correlational relationship was detected between landmarks and historical place (Pearson correlation=0.79, N=256). In conclusion, city images are concentrated on the northern side of the research area side.