Permanence and Fragility: Reading an Urban Corridor in Erzurum through Collective Memory

This study reads the urban corridor extending from Atatürk University to the Inner Citadel (İç Kale) in Erzurum not as a series of isolated monuments but as a connected urban backbone along which traces belonging to different historical periods accumulate side by side. The theoretical framework combines Kevin Lynch's approach to urban imageability and legibility with Aldo Rossi's concepts of urban permanence and collective memory. Methodologically, the nodes along the corridor are examined through a comparative historical-spatial reading of development plans, archival photographs, historical and current satellite imagery, written sources and oral narratives. The findings show that permanence is multidimensional, operating simultaneously on physical, imagistic, mnemonic/oral and functional planes, and that it does not require the unchanged survival of form. Fragility likewise takes many forms beyond demolition, including functional change, loss of context, reduced visibility and weakening intergenerational transmission. Change along the corridor is read through a three-part typology: rupturing change, persistence-through-transformation, and re-visibilizing change.