- Continuity of the Spirit of a Place – Case of a Historic Town    357 kb by    Ornek Ozden, Elif & Yerliyurt, Bora & Seçkin , Ebru | elifornek@gmail.com    Short Outline This paper aims to define and put forward the characteristic elements that constitute the logic of a settlement and to discuss contemporary developments. Bergama has been selected as research area. Abstract Bergama is an historic district of Ýzmir, located at the inner side of the North Aegean region. The settlement has four main layers including different characteristic of urban fabric which can be decomposed on macro-form. The earliest urban fabric belongs to an ancient Hellenistic city, Pergamum and its surroundings. The second urban fabric is the settlement developed on the slopes of Acropolis where Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman cities settled on. This area is mostly a residential area where Armenian, Jewish and Turkish communities created the architectural and the urban heritage. The third urban fabric is the riverside settlement on the plain ground. Even at the second one, concinnity to the natural thresholds and considering the human scale constitutes the main characteristics of the third urban fabric. And the latest urban fabric is the developing contemporary / “modern” part of Bergama. As it happens in the variation of dwellings due to the changing users, habits and interval time; social and physical forces also creates differences in the urban characteristics. While the cultural diversity of a settlement corroborating the cultural tourism, meanwhile recent modern developments continue to spoil the historic town. But unfortunately today the urban macro-form develops without utilizing the principles of existing historical environment, such as location, pattern, density and natural thresholds resulting damage on the spirit of the place and genius loci … This paper aims to define and put forward the characteristic elements constituting the logic of settlement and to discuss in order to carry on in contemporary developments. Keywords urban fabric, urban image, the spirit of a place, cultural diversity Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2006: Cities between Integration and Disintegration   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper