Effects of Tourism Oriented Interventions on Community Dwellers in Historical Districts: The Case of Amasya Sofular District

Historical districts being redesigned using several intervention methods are served as belvedere spaces to consumption of tourists and visitors. In this process, public resources are spent on the arrangement of city centers to turn them into tourist attractions instead of urban services and urban service areas. Consequently, this leads to an increase in the cost of urban land and real estate which becomes the basis for the displacement process of community dwellers. For this reason, this study aims both at discovering the historical district dwellers’ perceptions of such tourism oriented interventions and the factors affecting their perceptions. Therefore a questionnaire was held at Sofular District in Amasya which owns all characteristics of Ottoman civil architecture. Principal components analysis (PCA) was used to understand the perceptions of dwellers on tourism oriented interventions and One-Way Anova analysis was used to understand how these perceptions differ according to various characteristics of participators. Research indicates that dwellers are anxious about the tourism oriented interventions and tourism development in the area as they think that district identity would be spoiled, life styles, neighborhood relations and consumption patterns would differ, and fear of displacement (process of gentrification) due to an increase of rent and real estate values in the district. Three factors as determinants of historical site dwellers’ reactions and attitudes towards tourism were concluded from the principal component analysis. Those factors were respectively named “social environment”, “economic environment” and “cultural environment”. It was found out “social environment” is the most determining factor which affects historical site dwellers’ reactions and attitudes towards tourism