A study of design approaches to Istanbul's city halls based on space syntax theory

Along history, to meet the common requirements of citizens and/or to rule the city, there have been different types of buildings. Despite the city administration, which has started in dwellings, had been being kept on in varied types of building such as agoras, castles, churchs; contemporarily, as a building type to rule the city, "city halls" have emerged. In the early period, city halls were the buildings that have been designed to rationally meet the requirements of the city. These kind of buildings haven't become integrated with other functions in the city, and have been active like office buildings, in order to meet the requirements. On the other hand, the city halls of present days are the buildings more integrated with the city, alongside of municipal services, host some alternative functions such as wedding halls, shopping spaces, multifunctional halls etc. Because of growing population and local problems that urbanization causes, to local authorities it became a must to provide services on-the spot to produce solutions. It doesn't seem possible to solve problems, which have emerged because of urbanization, without participation of citizens. Therefore, changes in management approach cause differences in spatial setup. Accordingly, to invesitgate how the changing approach of serving reflects on recently constructed city halls, from three districts, three city halls with different plan types (Küçükçekmece City Hall, Sultangazi City Hall, Şişli City Hall) were selected. While selecting these three city halls, existence of stylistic differences were minded, in spite of that it was also took into consideration that they have similar sizes, heights and organization schemes. In these city halls, densely used serving points were specified, and syntactical analyses of these points were conducted. The three important serving units were specified and handled in analyses as "copmlaint/solution unit" (which is mostly called as "beyaz masa" or "mavi masa" in Turkish), council chamber and office of president, according to their plan types. In the city halls, to examine the acts in the space and the interaction between the people and the service provider, the observation method was used. According to the positions of these three units in the building, routes that the citizens follow to reach to the units, ways how citizens act on these routes were examined. Doing syntactic measurements of the spaces and discussing differences in the results, in order to comprehend the ways people act during their route from the entrances of the buildings to the units, generate the basis of the analyzing model. With this model, it is possible to evaluate and compare the obtained data. Datas, that measured syntactically as a part of this study, are integration and visual integration datas. These datas were obtained by using the software-"UCL DepthmapX", with space syntax method. Within the scope of this software, in order to calculate the spatial integrity value, which were used in analysis, measurements of these following space syntax terms were utilized: total depth, relative asymmetry value (RA), real relative asymmetry value (RRA). While calculating the visual integritiy value, visibility spaces' relatedness were measured by isovist based calculation, in global system.