Keeping the Pulse of Heritage Awareness in Ankara: Two Historic Sites, Two Interventions

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A B S T R A C T How heritage is preserved and transmitted to future is heavily dependent on the responsible awareness of its local society. Transformations in a historic urban landscape (HUL) are intervening into its collective memory, affecting its social sustainability and resilience. This paper considers two of these cases from the historic district of Ankara, namely Hacıbayram Square and Hergelen Square, to see whether the demographic changes in the society has a similar consequence on the public awareness of the historicity and heritage values of their sites. The first case, which is a cult site of heritage, history, and religion, was previously studied. This paper explains the study for the second case, Hergelen (İtfaiye) Square with a more recent historical significance, and interprets the outcomes of the two studies tieh their differing and common aspects. Hergelen Square has been exposed to a series of demolitions, two of which are the foci of this work: the Bank of Municipalities building, a heritage monument from the early republican era of Turkey, and Otto Herbert Hajek’s sculpture. The questionnaire outcomes of both independent surveys demonstrated that as the educational level of the participants decreased the admiration for the transformative interventions increased. However, being identified with different priorities and functions, the case of Hergelen Square, when considered with its past and former intervertions that it has been exhausted to, implicated further insights about the problem of integrity of the HUL of Ankara.

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Keeping the Pulse of Heritage Awareness in Ankara: Two Historic Sites, Two Interventions *Dr. ECE KUMKALE AÇIKGOZ1 1Faculty of Fine Arts, Design and Architecture, Department of Architecture, Başkent University, Ankara, Turkey E mail: eacikgoz@baskent.edu.tr A B S T R A C T How heritage is preserved and transmitted to future is heavily dependent on the responsible awareness of its local society. Transformations in a historic urban landscape (HUL) are intervening into its collective memory, affecting its social sustainability and resilience. This paper considers two of these cases from the historic district of Ankara, namely Hacıbayram Square and Hergelen Square, to see whether the demographic changes in the society has a similar consequence on the public awareness of the historicity and heritage values of their sites. The first case, which is a cult site of heritage, history, and religion, was previously studied. This paper explains the study for the second case, Hergelen (İtfaiye) Square with a more recent historical significance, and interprets the outcomes of the two studies tieh their differing and common aspects. Hergelen Square has been exposed to a series of demolitions, two of which are the foci of this work: the Bank of Municipalities building, a heritage monument from the early republican era of Turkey, and Otto Herbert Hajek’s sculpture. The questionnaire outcomes of both independent surveys demonstrated that as the educational level of the participants decreased the admiration for the transformative interventions increased. However, being identified with different priorities and functions, the case of Hergelen Square, when considered with its past and former intervertions that it has been exhausted to, implicated further insights about the problem of integrity of the HUL of Ankara. CONTEMPORARY URBAN AFFAIRS (2019), 3(2), 63-72. https://doi.org/10.25034/ijcua.2018.4702 www.ijcua.com Copyright © 2018 Contemporary Urban Affairs. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The idea that cultural heritage should be considered within the complete landscape that it constitutes a part of has been generating a series of implementations around the Globe. It is the awakening that admits conservation of cultural objects in isolation has a destructive effect for cultural and urban integrity (Turner and Tomer, 2013). Integrity is a key concept which is used to explain the conditions where things are meaningful for those who see, appreciate, and live with them (Ripp and Rodwell, 2016). This appears to be the reasoning behind the HUL approach in which the responsible awareness of the people living in that specific cultural landscape. This study explores the question why and how the interrupted urban integrity can be dangerous for the heritage objects in a cultural landscape on the example of Ankara. This study explores Ankara’s historic integrity through the final intervention applied in the Hergelen Square through the framework of the HUL approach, and considers its survey outcomes together with a previous survey on the public perception of the heritage value of another historic site in the same district. These two sites have been subject to similar scales of interventions recently that represent a greater scale of transformation together. Given the HUL based role of local communities on urban preservation of a city’s historic integrity, this study is based on the research question that asks whether the social awareness of and responsibility for cultural heritage preservation in the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) of Ankara is affected by major transformative interventions in its historic sites. An indicator for this affection is the responses of the public to these interventions. On a search for how these interventions are conceived by the public, it is possible to come across with the declarations of academics or institutions representing the experts of urban planning and/or architecture as reactions against the illegality of these interventions, their effects and consequences. On the contrary, a majority of the public press and declarations of local authorities have a completely different discourse about the way they comprehend the transformed environments. Therefore, the polarity in-between these two opposing perceptions makes it necessary to research on the actual comprehension of the public for the causes and effects of these interventions. The public has a shared memory of these sites under transformation embracing their pasts, ongoing transformative interventions that they were subject to and these two opposing perceptions on these interventions. Hence, the current perception of the public may provide an insight about how these interventions might change the way HULs are conceived by the local public. The questions that arise from this need are threefold. The first asks whether the residents of Ankara valued a former intervention in Hergelen Square as a part of their cultural perception for the city. The second question asks what consequences the former disintegrated solutions have for today’s citizens. And the third one asks whether a comparison of the outcomes of the independent surveys on the public perception of the historicity of two different parts of the HUL of Ankara display a common indication about the effects of interventions in the public awareness for cultural heritage. In order to achieve the required answers, a public survey on the Hergelen (İtfaiye) Square in Ankara was applied based on its shared memory among Ankara’s residents and their conceptions about the recent transformations. The results of the survey were considered together with a previous study on the cult historic site of Hacıbayram Square and the public perception of the recent transformations applied on it. 2. The problem of interrupted urban integrity Problem of interrupted urban integrity is expressed by Ripp and Rodwell (2016) as the condition of destroyed systemic properties, where the system is divided into isolated objects or concepts. This isolation is a result of leaving the responsibility of having a perception for heritage protection to a very limited community of experts. It also means the dissolution of the links between heritage objects and the contexts that renders them as meaningful parts of an integrated whole. As Ripp and Rodwell (2016) suggest, urban heritage is meaningful by way of its interaction with people and people may not assume responsibility on individual objects of heritage like buildings which do not have a meaningful integration with today’s communities. Inversely, when an object is a meaningful part of the urban landscape, this responsibility reveals public action. As Myolland and Grahn (2012) put it, when the objects of a cultural landscape are not formally listed as heritage, preservation of cultural heritage is often handled by the voluntary actions of the local communities. The role of public on heritage protection is connected with the meaningful integration of the heritage with its community. According to Harvey (2001) heritage is the long term development of its society and it is a societies relationship with its past that determines the focus of what to research on its heritage (Harvey, 2001, p.320). It is explained with the value system of a community, where heritage is the object of which. Especially for today, urban communities are not stable, nor can their value systems be. This has reflections with the cities that the communities interact, and as Bandarin and van Oers (2012) explain the natural change in a city can be through its adaptation to the evolution of social structures and needs which also determine the limits of acceptable change.

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