An analysis of street as a shopping precinct : Tunali Hilmi Street vs shopping centers

Download
2010
Bakırcıoğlu Ünsal, Burcu
Streets, the usual public spaces of cities, lose their popularities and users every passing day. The reason of this decline is the erroneous transport policies implemented in cities that increase the entrance of automobile into city centers and facilitate faster movement of automobiles at the expense of pedestrians. While pedestrians are marginalized in city centers, automobiles become the primary users of streets. The traffic, noise and air pollution that automobiles cause contribute to the decline of town centers and shopping streets lose their function as meeting places and public spaces. In addition, automobile oriented policies create car-dependent urban forms and cause sprawl towards the peripheries. Because of the newly developing dwelling areas on the peripheries and the increasingly inaccessible city centers, number of out-of-town shopping centers increase day by day to meet the daily needs. While shopping centers develop, there is now a new tendency to design them with streets, squares and bazaars, with a view to resemble and simulate street life in these shopping centers. This situation shows us that, users, who are the reason of existence of social spaces, actually need the atmosphere of streets. In this study, while analyzing all these trends and factors, Tunalı Hilmi Street, which is a once pedestrian-friendly street in Ankara, will be analyzed. The study has two main research tasks. First, it analyses Tunalı Hilmi Street’s potentials as a public space and street, through the development of a framework that incorporates the essential urban design theorems with a special focus on street design. Secondly, it carries out a questionnaire on shopping center users in Ankara, in order to assess their choices, preferences, and perceptions regarding shopping centers and Tunalı Hilmi Street. Based on the findings of these two analyses, this thesis aims to propose planning and design strategies to improve Tunalı Hilmi Street as a public space and to attract more users to it.

Suggestions

Consolidating the image of the city : mobile phones and new identities
Şentürk, Meltem; Barlas, Mehmet Adnan; Department of City and Regional Planning (2010)
The aim of this thesis is to examine the affects of mobile communication practices on urban public places, particularly on meeting places in urban space. The contribution of mobile communication technologies into daily practices and rapid penetration of them into everyday-life is quite obvious in the last decade. The inevitable presence of mobile phones in everyday-life practices encourages urban researchers to consider their impacts on urban social context and consequently on urban public places. The objec...
Public transport improvement policies : assessment of the role of route and fare integration, modal reorganization with special emphasis to İzmir case
Öncü, Mevlüde Ayça; Babalık, Ela; Department of Urban Policy Planning and Local Governments (2007)
Public transport improvement and new public transport management approaches are accepted as the most effective tools in order to cope with the urban transportation problem threatening sustainable urban life and efficient functioning of urban areas. The need for new solutions to replace, or support, costly new capacities created two new concepts at the two ends of the transportation phenomenon; Travel Demand Management (TDM) on the demand side and Transportation System Management (TSM) at the supply side. Th...
A design problem of under-utilized spaces : the case of Ankara-old industrial district
Cırık, Umut; Osmay, Sevin; Urban Design in City and Regional Planning Department (2005)
The problem of under-utilized spaces has become an important problem of cities during the last decades. In rapidly urbanizing cities, especially in the city centers where the early city settlement or old town was situated, many urban and industrial functions have moved out leaving behind abandoned or under-utilized. These spaces, due to political, economical, cultural and spatial reasons, could neither undergo healthy urban transformation process nor be reused. Such spaces pose problems to contemporary urba...
An approach to achieve design recommendations for interior elements of urban railway transport with regard to user perception of semantic dimensions
Turhan, Mehmet; Hasdoğan, Mehmet; Department of Industrial Design (2008)
Although, the literature reveals that coach interior designs have been emphasized as an important factor determining their competitiveness in the market and the quality of an interior design can be effectively improved by using information about passenger expectations, few practical studies exist to assess the urban railway transport interiors from the passengers’ perspective. Consequently, designers lack reliable criteria to guide their decisions which would satisfy users. In this study, it is intended to ...
The changing publicness of contemporary public spaces A case study of the Grey s Monument Area Newcastle upon Tyne
Akkar Ercan, Zübeyde Müge (2005-01-01)
Parallel to the recent rise in interest in public spaces, the proliferation of alluring, distinctive and exclusive public spaces in many post-industrial cities raises the question of how far these environments are truly ‘public’. This paper discusses the question of the ‘publicness’ of contemporary public spaces in Britain, where they have been placed at the top of the political agenda of the Labour Governments since the late-1990s. Studying in depth the changing ‘publicness’ of the Grey's Monument Area (GM...
Citation Formats
B. Bakırcıoğlu Ünsal, “An analysis of street as a shopping precinct : Tunali Hilmi Street vs shopping centers,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2010.