Changing urban identity in the Eastern Mediterranean port cities from the Ottoman period to the nation-state: the case of Mersi̇n and Volos

Eastern Mediterranean port cities had been the spaces of change during the nineteenth century, when Ottoman Empire was practicing a modernization process depending on new settling commercial relations to the industrialized core. Economical, social and political changes in this period resulted in the advent of new land use units within urban form. The built environment was subject to changes through interventions of different actors, local and central, in a relational way through their varying needs and expectations. Urban identity of port cities, depending on social diversity and architectural distinctiveness, significant transformations occurred with the interventions of nation-states, since urban space became a medium to create a new identity. In this period, implementation of new largescale infrastructure projects, such as port areas, resulted in breaking the powerful relations between the sea and the city that were settled in the previous periods. Whereas these investments dismantled the relational space, produced through the components of identity that gave their character to port cities, the relational positioning of different land uses in urban form and the coherent urban structure they produced were disappeared In this study, changing identity of Eastern Mediterranean port cities is investigated through a comparison between Mersin and Volos, two cities of a similar scale. Being a part of two different nation states -Turkey and Greece- their changing identity and characteristics of the built environment are scrutinized through an exploration into the spatial politics of nation states, and the changes in the local distinctiveness of port cities, needs and expectations of local actors, and the components of their identity and character are questioned.Publisher's Versio