Üniversite öğrencilerinin kentsel çevre algısı üzerine bir araştırma: İzmir örneği

Abstract

Behavioral geography, one of the sub-branches of geography, examines how differently people perceive the environment where they live and what the factors that are influential on these different perception processes are, considering the variations in people’s areas of interest, socio-cultural background, education, and level of consciousness. Actually, every person has his/her unique geography, and this geography is interpreted by being shaped in line with people’s age, gender, experience, needs, and wishes (Aliagaoglu, 2007; Bunting, Guelke, 1979). So, there is a permanent and mutual interaction between the environment and human beings. During the interaction concerned, the environment sends several messages to the people and people’s evaluating and straining them is expressed as perception (Orer, 1993). The fact that elements of physical and human geography are effective on people’s perception of the environment has made it inevitable that the issue of “perception of the environment” be included in the behavioral geography. Cities are settlement units where the mutual interaction between human beings and the environment can be observed in the most considerable and active way. Within this framework, how human being-environment relationships are perceived and expressed by people constitutes the basic research subject in the subbranch of behavioral geography. In this study, the environmental perceptions, by the students at Ege University, of Izmir that is the city where students at Ege University live and that has maintained the urban tradition since the past and the reasons for this were examined. For the field research on the matter, the students in the Faculty of Letters that attracted the attentions with its departments that were nested more with urban life were selected as the sample. The students were asked questions to determine their perception of the urban environment in Izmir, and it was intended to obtain their opinions about their degrees of satisfaction with the city they lived in and the aspects of the city that they liked or felt uncomfortable with. Furthermore, the participants were asked to write the connotations of Izmir and to reflect them on their mental maps with symbols. The obtained information was turned into figures by means of statistical methods and transferred into tables and graphs. In addition, connotations were made. Considering this, depending on the education, cultural background and areas of interest of the students in the Faculty of Letters, it was intended to make a comparative evaluation of the variation in their perception of the city of Izmir.

Keywords

• geographical environment
• behavioral geography
• mental map
• urban environment perception
• ege university