A method proposal for transferring urban memory to the future with digital technologies: Eskişehir Hamamyolu example

From the moment people settled down, they entered into a social sharing. Places that allow society to share are public spaces. Cities are public spaces where not only the individual people living in them, but also the social experiences embedded in the essence of that city are recorded. The spaces of the city that change and transform over time continue their existence thanks to individual or collective memory from the past. Therefore, public spaces that bear the traces of social experiences are memory spaces that express the culture and memory of that city. Cities are in constant change and transformation over time. While some of the urban spaces have changed and transformed and survived until today, some have completely disappeared. In this context, it is very important to protect the places that represent the city's memory and have an impact on its identity. The existence of spaces that hold the individual and social memories of those living in the city enables those individuals to feel a sense of belonging to the place they are in and to experience the awareness of being a society by taking care of the place they share in common. However, over time, natural disasters, urbanization policies, etc. Change and transformation of urban spaces are inevitable for various reasons. At the same time, it is not possible to physically protect memory places. For this reason, digital technologies have begun to gain importance in preserving the memory places of cities and transferring them to the future. In this study, Hamamyolu Bazaar was chosen as the first shopping and socializing place, which has an important place in the formation of Eskişehir's collective memory. Spatial data of the region, where the bazaar was used extensively due to the presence of hot waters, between 1940 and 1980, was collected and reconstructed in a virtual reality environment. Memory-space data were collected through interviews with individuals living in these periods before and after the virtual reality experience. A digital archive has been created with all data for the sustainability of collective memory. As a result, this study offers a method proposal to ensure the sustainability of collective memory in the digital environment.