2019-2020
Sustainable Urbanism: Envisioning New Agents for Planning and Designing Sustainable Spaces
UD 502 Urban Design Studio II aimed to focus on problem-solving through design ideas to make places sustainable. In 2020, during the Spring term, we used the notion of sustainable urbanism (SU) as a generic theme of the studio course. We studied Göreme, a small town in the heart of Cappodocia, and its critical parts to promote its long-term viability and liveability by reducing consumption, waste and harmful impacts on people, places and environment, and to enhance the physical, ecological, economic, social well-being, health and equity of people, places and environment. As Cappadocia is a unique natural heritage site in the Central Anatolia, conservation and heritage-led regeneration have become the critical issues to be addressed in the case of Göreme. Göreme, a UNESCO World Heritage Listed Site, needed particular care in heritage conservation and mass tourism management. The urban design projects have addressed all these critical issues by focusing and examining some SU agents, such as public space, soil, eco-museum, place identity, adaptability and life cycle. The student teams ultimately tried to develop a sustainable public space strategy, an urban eco-museum strategy through soilscape, a place identity strategy promoting the place identity component in a sustainable and balanced way, and an adaptability strategy to achieve a sustainable urban environment and a life-cycle design strategy for an urban neighbourhood.
Under the newly emerging pandemic conditions in March 2020, students and the studio teaching team worked very hard to achieve the urban design projects through online communication platforms and remote teaching tools. We want to express our appreciation to all the students for their adaptability and resilience capacity. We are also thankful to our jury members, who kindly discussed our design projects’ pros and cons and gave tremendous feedback to our projects during the field trip in Cappadocia and Göreme and afterwards.
Studio instructors: Müge Akkar Ercan (coordinator), Cansu Canaran (part-time instructor), Selen Karadoğan (research assistant)
Students: Yağmur Aşçı, Hadeel Abuzaid, Gizem Demirkol, Yağmur Erişen, Esra Gürel, Hareem Falak, Büşra Sönmez, Ekin Güneş Şanlı, Sena Temurer, Aybüke Tufan, Göksun Yıldırım