İżnik Town and Its Rural Landscape: Decision Making, Socio-Demographic Profiling and Conservation Policy Development

ABSTRACT

In light of recent advances in landscape conservation, this study introduces a profiling model that provides context-sensitive heritage conservation strategies. The model is adaptable and focuses on socio-demographic profiling of a rural landscape. It uses İznik (ancient Nicaea) town, a UNESCO World Heritage candidate, and the surrounding rural landscape as a case study area. The model captures the intricate interplay between the socio-demographic conditions of agriculture-based local communities and rural heritage, offering policy options to enhance community well-being and conserve rural heritage. Based on the complementary use of Cluster and Multiple Correspondence Analysis, the model employs multi-layered analysis of quantitative and qualitative data. The model identifies six distinct clusters, revealing the vulnerability and resilience of rural settlements around İznik town, and the priority sites where rural heritage and local populations face immediate threat. Fostering a symbiotic relationship between data-driven insights and locally informed policies, this model generates evidence-based, people-centred policy outputs for heritage conservation, which may be applicable in a variety of contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Landscape approaches
• computational methods
• heritage conservation
• rural landscapes
• socio-demographic change
• İ̇znik

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ICOMOS-IFLA, “ICOMOS-IFLA Principles”; ICOMOS, ‘Florence Declaration on Heritage and Landscape as Human Values’; ICOMOS, ‘Charter on the Built Vernacular Heritage’; Crossman et al., ‘Systematic Landscape Restoration in the Rural-Urba’; OECD, Rural-Urban Partnerships: An Integrated Approach to Economic Development; OECD, ‘Rural 3.0 “People-Centred Rural Policy”’; Cialdea and Mastronardi, ‘Integrated Approach in the Planning Stage for Landscape Conservation in the Coastal Italian Areas’; IFAD, Suttie, and Hussein, ‘Territorial Approaches, Rural-Urban Linkages and Inclusive Rural Transformation’; Council of Europe, ‘European Landscape Convention’; Council of Europe, ‘Recommendation of the Committee of Ministers to Member States on the European Cultural Heritage Strategy for the 21st Century’; Trapani, ‘A Territorial Approach to the Production of Urban and Rural Landscape’; Forster et al., Territorial Approaches for Sustainable Development; UNESCO, The International Protection of Landscapes.

2. Arts et al., ‘Landscape Approaches: A State-of-the-Art Review,’ 440.

3. Orsi, Cavaco, and Gil, “From Territorial Capital to Regional Design,” 2; de Montis, ‘Measuring the Performance of Planning: The Conformance of Italian Landscape Planning Practices with the European Landscape Convention,’ 1728–29.

4. For an overview of recent works that have employed computational methods at various stages of rural landscape conservation, see Barrientos et al., “Computational Methods and Rural Cultural & Natural Heritage.”

5. For more, see Ulusan, “Analysis of Management Planning and Governance Systems for Cultural Heritage Places in Türkiye”

6. While historically, the basin of İznik Lake shaped this landscape, the current administrative boundaries divide the region in half along the north-south direction. Consequently, the administrative borders of the İznik district are now confined to the lake’s eastern part, delineating the case study area.

7. A Tentative List is an inventory of properties considered by each state party for nomination. For a summary of Iznik town, see https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5900/.

8. While the mounds of Ilıpınar, Çakırca, Çiçek and Üyücek suggest that this area had been inhabited since the prehistoric periods, archaeological surveys, epigraphic evidence, historical and literary accounts confirm a strong continuity of the settlement history around İznik Lake from the Hellenistic Period until today. See, Otto-Dorn, Das Islamische Iznik; Raby, ‘A Seventeenth Century Description of Iznik-Nicaea’; Strabon, Antik Anadolu Coğrafyası; Bernard and Lefort, La Bithynie Au Moyen Age; Akbaygil, İnalcık, and Aslanapa, Tarih Boyunca İznik; Lowry, ‘Gezginlerin Gözünden ve Idari Kayıtlardaki Bilgilerin Işığında Osmanlı Döneminde İznik, 1331–1923’; de Peyssonel, (1745) Yılında İzmit ve İznik’e Yapılmış Bir Gezinin; Alioğlu and Kösebay Erkan, ‘Nicaea/Iznik : A City Image as Heritage’; Hammer, Hammer Seyahatnamesi; Kaplanoğlu, Kocaeli Livası Tahrir Defterleri İznik Kazası.

9. Kumaş, ‘Vilayet Salnameleri ve TÜİK Verileri Işığında İznik’in İdari ve Demografik Yapısı (1870–1950)’; İl Yıllığı Hazırlama Komitesi, 1973 Bursa İl Yıllığı; Turkish Statistical Institute (TUİK), ‘Genel Nüfus Sayımları.’

10. İbid.

11. Race, Luck, and Black, “Patterns, Drivers and Implications of Demographic Change in Rural Landscapes”

12. Race, Black, and Luck, Demographic Change in Australia’s Rural Landscapes; Gosnell and Abrams, “Amenity Migration;’ Holmes and Argent, ‘Rural Transitions in the Nambucca Valley;” Salt, The Big Shift.

13. Heiland, Spielmans, and Demuth, “Demographic Change;” Gómez-Ullate et al., “Demographic Challenges in Rural Europe and Cases”.

14. Costello, “Going Bush”; Di Fazio and Modica, “Historic Rural Landscapes”; Habiyaremye, Kruss, and Booyens, “Innovation for Inclusive Rural Transformation”; Zhou, Chu, and Du, “Safeguarding Traditional Villages in China”; Gretter et al., “New Farming as an Example of Social Innovation Responding to Challenges of Inner Mountain Areas of Italian Alps”; Pola, “When Heritage Is Rural”; Cattaneo, Nelson, and McMenomy, “Global Mapping of Urban-Rural Catchment Areas Reveals Unequal Access to Services”; Park and Selman, “Attitudes towards Rural Landscape Change in England”; Xu, Pittock, and Daniell, ‘China.’

15. Hugo, ‘Regional Australian Populations’

16. Gómez-Ullate et al., “Demographic Challenges in Rural Europe and Cases”

17. Park and Selman, “Attitudes towards Rural Landscape Change in England.”

18. Zhou, Chu, and Du, “Safeguarding Traditional Villages in China;” Costello, “Going Bush;” Gretter et al., “New Farming as an Example of Social Innovation Responding to Challenges of Inner Mountain Areas of Italian Alps;’ Gómez-Ullate et al., ‘Demographic Challenges in Rural Europe and Cases”

19. Zhou, Chu, and Du, “Safeguarding Traditional Villages in China”

20. Costello, “Going Bush”

21. Habiyaremye, Kruss, and Booyens, “Innovation for Inclusive Rural Transformation;” Xu, Pittock, and Daniell, ‘China’

22. Farmar-Bowers, “Why Farming Families Decide to Maintain Native Biodiversity on Their Farms and the Implications of Demographic Change for Conservation Policies,” 240.

23. Antrop, “Why Landscapes of the Past Are Important for the Future,” 66.

24. Agboola et al., “The Cultural Sustainability of Traditional Market;” Agboola, “The Significance of Rural Markets as a Public Space in Nigeria”

25. Zhou, Chu, and Du, “Safeguarding Traditional Villages in China,” 92.

26. İbid. 91.

27. Antrop, “Why Landscapes of the Past Are Important for the Future;” Heiland, Spielmans, and Demuth, “Demographic Change;” Stewart, Race, and Curtis, “Demographic Change and the Implications for Commercial Forestry: Lessons from South-East Australia,” 212.

28. Stanners and Bourdeau, Europe’s Environment; Taaffe, Gauthier, and O’Kelly, Geography of Transportation.

29. Keller, “The Importance of Rural Development in the 21st-Century”

30. For more on the methodological debates on the advantages and limitations these methods, see Gray, “Classification as an Impediment to the Reliable and Valid Use of Spatial Information”

31. Lebart, “Complementary Use of Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis”

32. To control the potentially misleading effects of outliers, the number of group is set arbitrarily high. The critical number of clusters, denoted as CCl, in the first step is determined as CCl = √(n/2), where n represents the number of cases in the input data. The final number of clusters in the second step is determined using the ‘elbow method’ and then finalised via silhouette indices.

33. The information loss incurred can be measured through ‘within cluster variances’

34. For more, see Bertin, Semiology of Graphics; For some mapping examples using this matrice, see Eskişehir Büyükşehir Belediyesi, ‘Mor Haritam Eskişehir;’ Ankara Büyükşehir Belediyesi, ‘Mor Haritam Ankara;’ Türkiye Ekonomik ve Sosyal Etüdler Vakfı, ‘Kent95’

35. T.C. İçişleri Bakanlığı Sivil Toplumla İlişkiler Genel Müdürlüğü, ‘İllere ve Faaliyet Alanlarına Göre Dernekler’

36. Muhtars in the Turkish administrative system serves as unique local agents, as they neither fit the formal nor informal actor roles. They are officially elected every five years through local elections by neighbourhood or village residents in each settlement. As representatives of the smallest local administrative units, they play a pivotal role in the governance process and act as intermediaries between municipalities and their respective settlement communities, while possessing valuable knowledge of the socio-spatial dynamics of their settlement. In rural areas, they collaborate with the village council, a group of volunteers from the local community, to address key needs of their settlement, like healthcare, education, transportation, infrastructure, and security, as mandated by the 1944 Village Law. For more Massicard, Street-Level Governing: Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey; Aykaç, ‘Muhtars Becoming Real Estate Agents: Changing Roles of Neighborhood Representatives in Relation to the State-Led Urban Transformation in Çinçin, Ankara, Turkey’

37. Ethics approval for the surveys is obtained on 11 March 2022 from the Human Research Ethics Committees of Kadir Has University, with the following approval number: E-17446481-600 27,468. Only verbally informed consent was currently acquired from the headmen of each village because the surveys were conducted on the phone during the quarantine periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, these participants were anonymised since the surveys do not include personal opinions of the participants. We confirm that the anonymised participant data have not distorted the scholarly meaning.

38. The raw data, how it has been processed during the primary analyses, and the maps of the results for each thematic indicator are published online. For the details, see https://arcg.is/iv445

Additional information

Funding

This article has been developed as a part of the project titled ‘In the context of urban-rural continuity, Web-GIS based Integrated Site Management Model for historic cities: The Case of İznik.’ The grant sponsor of the project is Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu (the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye) (TUBITAK) and [Grant no: 119K333]. We, as the co-authors of this paper, confirm that there are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests among us to report.