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Hisar District is located within the borders of Osmangazi County. Hisar has a rich historical and cultural heritage and is a valuable historic landscape which carries not only the physical and spatial traces of this heritage but also preserves social and cultural features. With these features, Hisar District should be conserved for a sustainable future. Bursa Metropolitan Municipality considered the Hisar (Citadel) District as an Ottoman and World Heritage site and a research team from Bursa Uludag University has been given the task of preparing a management plan as a project in order to achieve conservation of the site with a sustainable approach. Led by the author of this paper, Dr Çahantimur, Bursa Uludag University Project Team prepared the plan with a place-specific and participatory approach. This study presents both the significance of Hisar heritage site and the participatory process of the site management plan. It also presents a critical review of the actions undertaken by the municipality since then. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this short article is modest: it means to fill a lacuna in scholarly output by offering a concise and accessible survey of the physical structure of the typical west Anatolian town in the High Middle Ages. Attempts to locate such a study meet with disappointment. If one wishes to look through the eyes of medieval travellers in Anatolia, whether they be merchants, pilgrims or soldiers, and discover what type of construction they witnessed when approaching and entering a typical town, one is compelled to trawl through a great number of specialist articles and monographs dealing with specific archaeological sites or particular narrow periods of history. This laborious exercise will be made somewhat redundant by a brief synthesis of the appropriate evidence which historians and archaeologists have addressed and compiled since the late 1950s when attempting to reconstruct the development of the Byzantine city. The article traces the slow development of the typical Anatolian urban form and aspect from the late fourth century, through the mid-seventh to mid-eighth centuries, and then through to a period of urban recovery until the latter part of the twelfth century. The choice of periods separated by some 800 years is not arbitrary: the physical character (and function) of the typical town began to change in the late fourth century, and the form it obtained during the seventh and eighth centuries continued to be the one retained (with inconsequential variations to the general pattern) during the intermediate periods of Byzantine recovery [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]