Attracting Amida-Diyarbakır: Muratorian, Conzenian urban morphology and Space syntax, a methodological comparison

The comparative application of different analysis methods to the same urban realm remains today (Whitehand, 2018), as it was 20 years ago (Whitehand, 1997) and (Marzot, 1998), the most interesting experimental field within the discipline of Urban Morphology. Our object of study should be the city and we should apply the tools deriving from the different theories to analyse the different urban contexts, and eventually to question, confirm or further improve those theories. The case study of Amida-Diyarbakir, hence its long formation process, was selected to overlap different urban analyses, belonging to the Muratorian and Conzenian Urban Morphology schools and to the Space Syntax methods: namely, the axial analysis, the orientation analysis, the attraction analysis, and the nodal analysis. The reconstruction of the formation process of Diyarbakir’s urban organism started from Garden’s (1867) description and Gabriel’s (1942) interpretations, using the available contemporary cadastral sources to shed some light on the Roman and Byzantine phases of the urban settlement. The research relied also on the scarce but meaningful Latin and Greek primary sources, together with a territorial scale morphological analysis. The main urban polarities, the subsequent fringe belts and the nodal intersections of paths and city walls, together with the evolution of urban types and tissues, all contributed to analyse in depth the attraction phenomenon (Camiz, 2018) in this city. It was possible therefore to individuate a new type of point attractor, the oblique point attractor with three diachronic variants: the non-restructuring oblique point attractor, the partially-restructuring oblique point attractor and the restructuring oblique point attractor.