Evaluating the City Image of Istanbul Historic Peninsula Through Academicians’ Perspective

Abstract

Urban studies are crucial to comprehend an environment with physical, social and psychological structures. There is no doubt that environmental psychology studies are important to this topic. This is why this research aims at presenting the city image of Istanbul Historic Peninsula through academicians’ perspective. The study analyzes the relationships among safe, unsafe, likeable, unlikeable, preferable and unpreferable urban elements, and concludes a general city image of the research area. We conducted 32 surveys with other scholars and analyzed the surveys via MAXQDA 2018 Analytics Pro program. To obtain reliable results, the Kuckartz–Rädikers zeta similarity analysis was conducted and the similarity value was obtained as “0.86”. The results show that the landmarks and districts are dominant in verbal maps. As for hand-drawn maps, landmarks and urban nodes are more dominant than other elements. Moreover, there are similarities between unsafe and unlikeable elements, and between likeable and safe elements. In conclusion, the urban legibility and image are intensively dominant in the eastern side of the research area (Atatürk Boulevard-oriented area) because of negative psychological boundaries.