Consolidating the Image of the City : Mobile Phones and New Identities of Meeting Places

This book is a survey conducted in Ankara, Turkey during 2009-2010. The results of the research shows how wireless communication technologies, especially the mobile phone, contribute to the development of urban identity via enhancing the mental structuring of coherent urban images. The motivation behind the survey was the ongoing debate about the loss of identity in general and urban identity in particular. The research can be summarized with these manifestations; 1) Dispersal of meeting places, 2) Increase in the variety of meeting places, 3) Increase in the number of interior meeting places, 4) Increase in the number of physically inconspicuous meeting places, 5) Emergence of open spaces, especially streets, as meeting places. The maps which are created due to the questionnaire research reveal how meeting space has transformed from a meeting point to a meeting path, or even a meeting area. This result could be interpreted as an insignificance of meeting places but insignificance does not mean much when it comes to the use of urban elements. The quantity of meeting places coupled with variety which means enriching social behaviors in urban space.