From the middle of 20th century, as a result of devastating effects of world wars conservation activities intensified on the protection in area scale. Together with central government and local authorities, the owner or the user of the building, entrepreneurs, groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and society were meant to be included in the process. Today, local authorities play important role in the implementation of the restoration or street rehabilitation projects. Today in Turkey, municipalities are the second most important actors in the field of conservation after Ministry of Culture and Tourism. There are seen important changes after 1980s in Turkey in the field of conservation, which are that the localization in conservation increased and the role of local governments became more important. From the beginning of 2000s, the power of municipalities increases with the transfer of decision-making power to the municipalities. In this thesis, the role of local authorities in the field of conservation was discussed with the case of Hamam&ouml / n&uuml / -Ankara, a good example of the conservation implementation of a local authority showing the approach and study process of the municipality. Before explaining implementations of Altindag Municipality in Hamam&ouml / n&uuml / and their different effects on site and the people / a short start giving general information about development of role of local authorities in the field of conservation throughout the world was done and the legislative process in Turkey was stated. Moreover, after the assessment of implementation under different titles, some proposals for future of Hamam&ouml / n&uuml / were done.

Urban public spaces have always been subjected to physical, economical,social, political and cultural transformations of the city. These changing dynamics could cause decay in the spatial qualities and could also lead to a loss of values and identities of urban spaces, especially in public spaces. This thesis explores the qualities of a particular urban space in Istanbul: the Emin&ouml / n&uuml / Square. Providing a guideline for the future urban design projects,the structure and the identity of the historical public space is aimed in this thesis. Firstly, in order to evaluate the qualities of urban public space a method of analysis has been developed in the study. For this purpose, the urban design theories and their methodologies of analysis have been discussed with respect to three main headings: urban form, urban activity and urban image. Furthermore, as parallel to this purpose, the criteria of the quality of urban space are developed by the help of the morphological, visual and perceptual analyses. In the second stage, the formation-transformation processes of the Emin&ouml / n&uuml / Square, spatial dynamics and urban operations have been discussed within the framework of the method of analysis in a historical aspect. The results of the analyses show that the spatial dynamics and the urban operations affected the quality of the Square negatively in all formal, visual,social and perceptual aspects. In other words, the Emin&ouml / n&uuml / Square lost its well-defined formal structure and transformed to a space which is deprived of activity structure and legible identity.

This thesis attempts to give the increasing importance of Ottoman port cities in the urban hierarchy during the nineteenth century and analyzes the urban transformation of these cities under the forces of changing administrative and socio-economic structure of the empire. The impact of European economic penetration and Ottoman Tanzimat Reforms were indicated as major causes for this changing structure. Beirut, being one of the major port cities of the Ottoman Empire is studied as a case study. The changing administrative and socio-economic structure of the Empire created an urban transformation which changed the city to a cosmopolitan trade capital from a small fortified port city.