An evaluation of conservation and rehabilitation studies in historical areaswithin the scope of resilience: Case of Hamamönü area in Ankara

In today's developing and globalizing world, cities and societies encounter unexpectedly variable problems such as energy problems, sudden migrations, epidemics and pandemics, global and local economic crises, and ecological change. One of the most current and fundamental concepts that have been developed against these problems in the modern era is 'resilience.' The concept of resilience, in general, is the holistic evaluation of a system and its layers in the idea beyond sustainability. When multi-layer urban systems are considered as chain systems consisting of different sub-units, the whole system is in a strong position as the rings' weakest link in its sub-units. A disregarded vulnerable link can cause the collapse of the entire system, and the same resilience principles apply to multilayered cities. Resilience is a holistic evaluation of the multilayered system parameters such as demographic, economic, ecological, infrastructural, and structural. Against this variety of threats, it is nearly impossible to protect each layer and functional elements separately. At this point, resilience comes into play as an integrated protection and maintenance mechanism. Many approaches have been developed on resilience in the studies on the holistic protection and maintenance of the system. RELi and CRI, two of the most comprehensive of these will be discussed in this study to examine resilience assessments in the historical areas through the case of Hamamönü in Ankara. In Turkey, the concept of resilience is comparatively new that is considered within sustainability. The case of Ankara, which is envisaged to be handled within the scope of this study, is a notable example of examining heritage conservation and heritage tourism within the framework of resilience. Ankara is not only the capital of the Turkish Republic and the first witness of the emerging democracy as it began here, but it also hosted and contains the heritage of the ancient cultures of mainly the Hittite, Phrygian, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman civilizations to the present. It is aimed to study the resilience of the historical areas in the case of the Ulus region in Ankara, where multiple cultural layers exist together. Several issues have been seen such as over-population, traffic, developments in the economic and ecological lives brought by the capital identity in Ankara. Hamamönü neighborhood, chosen as the thesis area, is an important cultural point in the old city center. After the rehabilitation interventions carried out in the Hamamönü region in 2009, large-scale economic, demographic, structural and infrastructural changes occurred in the region. In order to understand the resilience capacity of the Hamamönü sample, the economic, structural, historical, demographic and infrastructural, administrative layers of the region were examined, and data were collected through site analyses, oral surveys through in-person interviews and GIS measurements. The collected data were evaluated in the context of the CRI and RELi 2.0 resilience scales and various suggestions are developed. It is believed to be critical in creating a roadmap for what can be done in the future related to the protection of cultural heritage in Ankara. This thesis titled 'An Evaluation of Conservation and Rehabilitation Works in Historical Areas in the Scope of Resilience: The Case of Ankara Hamamönü' aims to examine the resilience levels of the conservation sites that are planned to be protected against unexpected crises and related changes after their rehabilitation.