Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
9th ICNTAD'23 CONFERENCE, Skopje, Makedonya, 19 - 21 Mayıs 2023, ss.25-33, (Tam Metin Bildiri)
Leftover spaces are urban areas that have not been designed or have lost their current function and fallen into disuse. The primary condition for reevaluating these areas is to define their use cycle, both physically and socially. The actors who best define these urban leftover areas are the users, rather than the designers or managers. In this context, user participation, as a form of democratic action, is now important in terms of determining the value of these spaces and creating a roadmap for regeneration. However, in today’s fast-changing metropolitan cities, traditional user participation methods remain limited and inefficient in terms of the space-time relationship. This study questions user participation in defining and reevaluating urban leftover spaces using digital methods, in a comparative manner with traditional methods. The main purpose is to propose a new potential contribution to the weaknesses of the traditional method by rethinking these processes through a digital mapping-based model. The method of the study consists of three stages. In the first step, the traditional processes of the user participatory design approach were examined through literature analysis, and an organizational schema was determined. In the second step, the analysis methods of the literature studies using the ARCGIS program, which is a digital geographic mapping system, were explored. The possible conflicts of this digital method with the traditional schema determined in the user-participatory design organization were examined. In the last step, the benefits and drawbacks of traditional and digital methods were revealed through a comparative SWOT analysis. The important conclusions of the study evaluate the role of urban users and the contribution of the role-playing method in the reevaluation of leftover spaces. In summary, this new digitalized model provides faster feedback on instant urban changes, contributes to social sustainability by creating an equal and transparent participatory behavior policy, increases the potential for these areas to be noticed and visible, and contributes to urban memory by creating a multi-layered archive for the changing space-time-subject relationship. On the other hand, there are potential threats to this new digital method, including the loss of an eye-level scale when looking at the area, rapid consumption, and the destruction of the sense of belonging to the area by involving non-local users in the design process. These are considered the most significant threats.