The Effects of Transformation on Identity and Meaning in Public Open Spaces, Samsun National Fair Area Example

Public open spaces are identity and memory spaces that have an important place in our daily lives in terms of social and cultural aspects and provide citizens with citizenship awareness and the opportunity to socialize. When transformation applications made for the purpose of adding economic value to cities or for functional obsolescence are realized negatively, the original identity and meaning of these spaces may be lost. Such a transformation scenario can be read through the Samsun National Fair, the second valuable fair of modern architecture in Turkey. The aim of the study is to analyze and evaluate the effects of urban and architectural transformations of Samsun National Fair, which has developed Samsun in socioeconomic, sociocultural and public sense throughout its existence, on identity and meaning by taking into account the human-environment relationship. Transformations at the urban scale include 'morphological' and 'functional' analyses. Morphological transformations include 'coastal line transformation', 'transportation networks' and 'figure-ground' analyses; functional transformations include 'function and action patterns' that are transformed in the area. Transformations on an architectural scale have been analyzed in a historical background, in a way that will follow the breaking points in a social sense, in a chronological order in ten-year periods from the year 1963, when the fair was founded, to the present day, by comparing it with the present day. Document analysis, information-document scanning method was used in the research. Data were obtained by scanning postcards, newspapers, Samsun City Museum Archive, relevant books and magazines related to the area. As a result of the research, it is seen that the original qualities of the Samsun National Fair, which is a secular, collective space and a heritage of late Republican architecture, have succumbed to transformation practices, and that its identity and meaning in recreational, commercial and cultural sense have been largely lost.