Slow City Urban Identities: a Comparative Study on Public Spaces of Seferihisar and Trani

Abstract

The formation of Slow City (Cittaslow), which is defined as a kind of sustainability movement, aims to preserve the collective memory, to protect the city, and to maintain the repetition that makes a space a home and the healthy relations between the people who keep the home alive. In this context, it would be appropriate to say that the formation is a kind of cultural sustainability movement. Negativities brought about by the rapidly developing and changing world leads to the creation of urban areas that are unidentified, uniform and have neither connection with the past nor the future. According to this concept, the main purpose of the research is to analyze to what extent the cultural identities of the cities under the scope of Slow City are read through the urban texture. At this point, as a research area, a comparative analysis study is carried out on the first Slow City of Turkey, "Seferihisar” and on the other hand, "Citta di Trani" from the country where the mentioned formation was born. For the comparison of the two cities mentioned, the criteria that are effective in the formation of urban identity are taken as basis. As the research areas are selected from two different countries, two different cultures’ approach to the formation is revealed.