(re)Mapping Neighborhood through sense of touch

I chose to map my neighborhood through the sense of touch. Istanbul is the most crowded city I have ever been in and the one thing that stands out most for me is the sense of touch. It is seemingly impossible to walk anywhere in the city without being bumped or jostled by the many people making their way through the city. I chose three of the my most frequented spots in Istanbul, my flat, school, and Taksim square, and mapped the streets I must take to get there and their relative level of crowdedness. Once arriving in these spots I chose to describe more of an emotion sense of touch listing the sensory and feeling words I experience in each on these spaces.

-William Trakas

on the way to school

each time i come to school i follow several public transportation routes: first starts in Tuzla, from home to Tuzla station (by walk, 12 min.), second is from Tuzla station to Bostancı station (by train, 45 min.), third is from Bostancı station to Bostancı port (by walk, 7 min.), fourth is from Bostancı port to Kabataş port (by seabus, 20 min.), fifth is funicular between Kabataş and Taksim (5 min.), sixth and last route is from Taksim square to Taşkışla (by walk, 15 min.) which equals 104 minutes and with addition of approximate awaitings, i spend 2 hours on the way to school.
my perception of the city changes according to the type and duration of the journey. it can be enjoyable, comfortable, boring, exhausting, horrible or fun thro the external causes. this is a situation map shows the types of the routes which will be enlarged on later.

Patrick Franke_Elmadag

The map is an abstract representation of the journey from my apartment to the university. Shadow is used to describe the slope of the streets, color is used to signify the difficulty of crossing the street.

The buildings along the main street are shown in an exaggerated, distorted perspective. This is done to create the feeling of the urban wall that is present on the street. The building on the far right is only outlined in black; this is because it is currently being built but is not yet part of the urban wall.

The rough pencil sketching of the extended neighborhood represents an area I know little about. For this reason I used pencil, a medium that can be erased. The frame is off-center to show my understanding of the extended city beyond.

Mapping though sense_ Smell mapping of Tarlabaşı

This mapping was the occassion to focus on one sense which is always solicited in Istanbul : smell but in a conscious way. I choose my neighboorhood Tarlabaşı because it is full of different smell changing with the hours, the days and also the part of the quarter. Smell can be particular events that constantly change or ambiant smell that remind the activity of a quarter. Some streets are enlightened even though they are small or unknown. For exemple, Akkiraz Sokagi is a small street where workers cook the mussel the whole day. Kurdela sokagi is on sunday the market street so the smells are different and stronger than the others days. Night smell maps can also be added. We can see that on the other side of Tarlabaşı Bulvar, there is less variety of smells.

Osmanlı Başkentinden Küreselleşen İstanbul’a: Mimarlık ve Kent, 1910 - 2010

Osmanlı Başkentinden Küreselleşen İstanbul’a: Mimarlık ve Kent, 1910 - 2010
15-16 ekim 2010, ITU TASKISLA
http://www.obmuze.com/2010/etk140910.asp

Borders of housing complexes

This mapping is about the physical+mental borders of the housing complexes along the cross-section from Adnan Saygun Road trough the Dereboyu Valley to the Zorlu Center at Besiktas district.
The walls, gates and other both architectural and non-architectural (trees etc.) elements of the built environment constitute physical as well as mental borders that limits/isolates users or gives a kind of place feeling to the users. The borders that users experience can differ from place to place and time to time.
The housing complexes along the cross-section give me a feeling of being isolated from the inside or outside at different levels. I tried to interpret this feeling through mapping.