Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
As Found: International Colloquium on Adaptive Reuse (summary pp.73-74)., Hasselt, Belçika, 5 - 07 Eylül 2023, cilt.1, ss.73-74
Heritage places are formed through the continuous interaction of the built environment and the local community. However, this interaction is often interrupted over time for various reasons. While in most cases, these heritage places lose their functions, in other cases, the local community shows resilience to these changes through the continuous rehabilitation and adaptation of heritage places. Accordingly, understanding bottom-up initiatives and self-organized actions in heritage conservation could generate innovative approaches. ‘The Documentation and Conservation Project of Pilavoglu Han in Ankara’ was designed to understand the self-organized dynamics of adaptation and generate conservation strategies for the building’s transformation with its current functions and users. Pilavoglu Han is a 16th-century Ottoman inner-city commercial han building in the historic commercial center of Ankara, Turkey. While many of the han buildings in Ankara have been transformed into cultural and touristic facilities in recent years, Pilavoglu Han continued to function as a multi-purpose building for commerce and accommodation. Starting from the mid-2010s, an artist community, mostly composed of women, began renting shops and collectively managed to endure the han’s spirit. The main shareholder and artist community conducted a collaborative process of choosing the ‘right functions’ and ‘right renters’ for empty spaces, which includes employing spatial tactics for new uses, such as enlarging small shop units to create workshop spaces for arts and crafts production and transforming the inner courtyard into a gathering space with a café. This paper focuses on the recent transformation of Pilavoglu Han, which can be regarded as a ‘slow and incremental adaptation’ in the form of self-organized actions and mobilization of the local community. By examining the local community’s economic, social, spatial, and functional strategies for adaptation, this paper proposes collaborative conservation strategies that involve the collective work of the artist community and heritage professionals, which might secure the building’s future as an exemplar of self-organized incremental adaptation in heritage places.