Historical Urban Fabric

Historic urban fabric is the total representation of urban architecture that has the capacity of creating the urban space and urban life of a particular society. It has guidance on providing the coherence between architectural values and cultural continuity of built environment. The man designs his built environment according to some functional and cultural bases. Therefore, urban architecture is a system or structure consisted of physical, social and cultural entities. In this system, understanding historic urban fabric initially necessitates understanding the essence of the entity. The urban components may alter with changing conditions of the modern world, but the essence of historic urban fabric lies in the relatedness between the architectural elements.

In modern world, with rapid urbanization, uncontrolled changes and growth of the cities have become threat to the authentic character and historic urban fabric of the cities. Moreover, with technological developments, functions of the urban environment have changed; thereafter, conservation of the historic urban fabric and its adaptation to new form of living and land uses have become significant issues for urban design and planning policies.

The main objective of this paper is to assert the necessity of understanding historic urban fabric in order to provide the perpetuation of the authentic character and architectural qualities. Defining historic urban fabric for a settlement necessitates understanding and reading the space because these practices release the inventory feature of the local character in terms of conservation practices.

The study puts forth the conservation problematic of historic urban fabric in Turkey in line with explaining the development process of Turkish planning system. In the last century, many Turkish towns have been disrupted with modernization tools and projects. With capitalist materialism, many global images and architectural features are stamped to the cities as contemporary projects. Sometimes, on behalf of maintaining just the physical historic urban fabric, some architectural elements are copied as a model to the new designs such that they were lack of their soul, meaning and historic significance. In this way, many cities in Turkey transformed due to the pressure of capitalist production and the historic urban fabric could not be preserved.

In some Turkish cities, the strong relationship between culture and character has been broken; in the meantime the common language that constitute the urban fabric has been forgotten. This study reveals that urban artifacts of history or historic architectural values are not the end products of a settlement; they are the result of a long-term formation including physical, social, cultural, economical interactions. Inherited environment has the capacity of creating the image of the city; thus, the built environment should be evaluated with its own entirety and continuum.

Key words: historic urban fabric; conservation; urban architecture; authentic character

Urban sprawl has become a noteworthy characteristic of urban development worldwide in the last decades. Recently the "compact city" model has come to agenda as an antithesis for urban sprawl in order to reduce the economic, environmental and social disadvantages of urban sprawl. Although the concept of compact city seems as a new issue in field of city planning, scrutinizing historical fabric of some cities reveals critical clues about the roots of this concept. Yazd city located in central part of Iran with a rich historical and cultural background and an idiosyncratic architecture and city fabric is a significant example of compact city. The city has always been known for its unique compact urban fabric and adaptability of its architecture and city planning to the region`s hot and arid climate. The city, however, has gradually misplaced its consistency in its physical and social context because of the rapid population growth and uncontrolled urbanization which has led to urban sprawl and loss of compact urban form within several decades. The resulting urban sprawl has caused various problems that are still unsolved. This study aims to analyze the characteristic of the city`s historical fabric to extract successful urban design principles adopted based on deep knowledge about the climatic and natural features of the region. The findings of this research reveal how traditional urban patterns can inspire planners to make cities more sustainable.

Background and objective: Central part of the old texture of Kerman is important for locating historical monuments and today is facing with many physical problems which create fundamental vulnerability factors against the possible earthquakes. The complexity of physical vulnerability in the historical contexts, in turn makes necessary the study and prediction of critical points during an earthquake using a precision instruments.
Method:  In this paper, using the GIS software and weighting method to indicators and overlapping the layers, the physical vulnerability zoning map of the texture is provided. 8 main indicators which were effective in physical vulnerability zoning based on background research and careful observation by expert have been used.
Findings: The northern, central and southern zones of the texture which have more small plots, poor quality of construction, less distance from the Qanats networks and chaotic and narrow road networks, are in higher physical risks. In addition, the high population density in the southern part of the texture has increased its overall risk in this part.
Conclusion: according to the research findings the northern, central and southern parts of the texture as well as northern and southern streets have physical vulnerabilities and require reducing actions such as maintaining continuity of western street performance during the earthquake emergency, organizing open spaces scattered within the texture, increase texture eligibility by using the distinctive elements and controlling the number of floors and closeness and ect, with the aim of reducing the risk of earthquake.
Keywords: physical vulnerability zoning, the old texture of Kerman, earthquake, geographical information system (GIS).

This chapter offers theoretical considerations and reflections on technological solutions that contribute to digitally supported documentation, access and reuse of localised heritage content in public spaces. It addresses immaterial cultural heritage, including informal stories that could emerge and be communicated by drawing hyperlinks between digitised assets, such as songs, images, drawings, texts and more, and not yet documented metadata, as well as augmenting interaction opportunities with interactive elements that relate to multiple media stored in databases and archives across Europe. The aim is to enable cultural heritage to be experienced in novel ways, supported by the proliferation of smartphones and ubiquitous Internet access together with new technical means for user profiling, personalisation, localisation, context awareness and gamification. The chapter considers cyberparks as digitally enhanced public spaces for accessing and analyzing European cultural heritage and ...