Cultural Landscape and Place Attachment: Case of Van City (Turkey)

Abstract

The relations between individuals, society and landscape can be understood and predicted through landscapes that are a kind of document about past, present and future with their tangible and intangible heritage values. Relations with cultural landscape through their natural and cultural heritage values provide a wide range of benefits from physical, mental and cognitive development to economic development to individuals and societies. In this article, it is aimed to determine the relations of the inhabitants of the city of Van with the landscape within the framework of the UNESCO Historical Urban Landscape (HUL) Recommendation in order to inform the participatory approach to Van cultural landscape management. For this purpose, a survey conducted with 254 inhabitants living in the center of Van city and its close vicinity in order to identify; the importance given to natural and cultural heritage, survey participants’ sense of place, level of knowing the folk songs and the relations between these variables were examined. The frequencies and significance scores as well as the spatial densities of these variables were determined and the relationships between them were examined by Pearson correlation analysis. The findings showed that both the important natural and cultural heritage and the important cultural landscapes for the participants are mainly the areas which provide multiple benefits such as recreation, scenery, learning about history and nature and sense of place. In this context, Van Lake and its surroundings, Muradiye Waterfall, Akdamar Church and Van Castle and its surroundings are the prominent places. In terms of sense of place, participants’ place attachment to Van is above the average and there is a high meaningful correlation between participants’ place identity and sense of place. The first two folk songs in terms of level of recognition by the survey participants have shown that natural and cultural heritage of Van have importance in their attachment to Van and Van identity. In this context, it should be ensured that the users can establish stronger connections with all the heritage features of Van in order to transfer Van cultural landscape’s tangible and intangible heritage values to the future. © 2019, Centenary University. All rights reserved.