Investigating the efects of nodes and landmarks in city plannig practice

Abstract

This thesis deals with the analysis of landmarks that are active elements in the formation of ordered urban spaces, in helping the creation of more qualified and identified cities and in increasing the quality of the living environment. It stresses why the landmarks are important for a city.s inhabitants and its visitors and aims to identify certain physical and social elements, which play role on the constitution of landmarks.Human beings and cities have strong interactions, relations and connections with each other. Man has some impressions and impacts from the city that he lives in or that he visited. These impressions are images that are collected from parts of cities. Visual urban elements play an important role on the formation of the impressions that he has. Social, economical and cultural facts are other active elements that effect human beings just like visual urban elements. The most important thing here is, all these experiments and impressions he has, are influenced from the urban environment and its visual elements.This study sees one of the functions of the planner as; lessening the effects of the unpleasant cities that we live in, with the positive effects of some urban elements like landmarks. Looking from this point of view, the first aim of this study is to examine the development and the usage of landmarks throughout history, the second is to define and classify landmarks and the third is to examine and discuss their use in the cities for the betterment of cities throughout history considering the planning principles.