The study of urban form as an Archipelago: the case of Ankara

Since the founding of the Turkish Republic, Ankara has been an experimental city that became a laboratory for urban production in line with the ideals of the republic. This experimentation resulted in multifarious urban forms. The initial emphasis of this research is to extract autonomous urban forms of Ankara as a city built with a set of aggregations on a fluvial land that has been transformed into an ambiguous entity remarkably varied in the form in time. To understand episodes of the city based on geography, it is crucial to founding a dialogue between the morphological layers of the city and the elevation of the topography. To be able to develop this kind of dialogue this paper aims to reread the city by referring to the concept of "archipelago" as an analytical tool from a typo-morphological perspective. The word archipelago is referred by O.M.Ungers and Rem Koolhaas to describe typologically the ensemble of self-sufficient built urban forms that are delimited via a common ground. In the case of Ankara, the common ground appears as the distinctive topography consisting of valley floors shaping the physical pattern of the city. A qualitative morphological decomposition method is pursued to generate a catalogue of types in several layers, mainly building footprints, street systems, and topography, in order to achieve three-dimensional morphological analysis. In accordance with this decomposition, a character mapping results in categorizing the city form as follows: gated enclaves, stacks, and objects.
In addition to the extraction, pursuing two major trajectories as landform and urban form in the character mapping leads to the exploration of analogies on the urban scale.