Regions with high tourism density are very sensitive to human activities. Ensuring sustainability by preserving the cultural characteristics and natural structure of these regions is of critical importance in order to transfer these assets to the future world heritage. Detecting and mapping changes in land use and land cover (LULC) using innovative methods within short time intervals are of great importance for both monitoring the regional change and making administrative planning by taking necessary measures in a timely manner. In this context, this study focuses on the creation of a 4-class LULC map of Muğla province over the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform by utilizing three different machine learning algorithms, namely, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and Classification and Regression Tree (CART), and on comparison of their accuracy assessments. For improved classification accuracy, as well with the Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 satellite images, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) are also derived and used in classification of the major land use classes, which are ‘built-up area & barren land’, ‘dense vegetation’, ‘water surface’, and ‘shrub, grassland & sparse vegetation’. Experimental results show that the most relevant algorithm is RF with 0.97 overall accuracy and 0.96 Kappa value, followed by SVM and CART algorithms, respectively. These results indicate that the RF classifier outperforms both SVM and CART classifiers in terms of accuracy. Moreover, based on the results of the RF classifier, 19% (2,429 km2) of the study region is classified as built-up area & barren land, 48% (6,135 km2) as dense vegetation, 2% (301 km2) as water surface and 30% (3,832 km2) as shrub, grassland & sparse vegetation class.

The application of geospatial information technologies has increased recently due to increase in data sources from the earth sciences. The systematic data collection, storage and processing together with data transformation require geospatial information technologies. Rapidly developing computer technology has become an effective tool in design and physical planning in international platforms. Especially, the availability of geospatial information technologies (remote sensing, GIS, spatial models and GPS) for diverse disciplines and the capability of these technologies in data conversion from two dimensions to the three dimensions provide great efficiency. Thus, this study explores how digital technologies are reshaping physical planning and design. While the potential of digital technologies is well documented within physical planning and visualization, its application within practice is far less understood. This paper highlights the role of the geospatial information technologies in encouraging a new planning and design logic that moves from the privileging of the visual to a focus on processes of formation, bridging the interface of the earth science and physical planning.

As a building element, the facade which interacts with external factors between two different environmental conditions is an important interface in energy consumption and the building life cycle. In recent years, smart materials have become a research topic in the field of sustainable architecture and facade technologies. The traditional material understanding which expects materials to not be affected by external environmental conditions by preserving their qualities throughout their lifespan has begun to leave its place to the understanding of materials that change quality and energy by reacting to external stimuli. Developing facade technologies and the energy-efficient design approach also achieve the development of new technologies in window systems. The most promising of these new window technologies, called smart windows, are electrochromic, thermochromic, and photochromic windows. Within the scope of this study, the energy performance of smart window systems has been evaluated comparatively with a traditional window system in a reference office building in Kayseri, Turkey. This study aims to evaluate the energy performances of smart windows and reveal their advantages and disadvantages over the available window system in this climate condition. In this context, smart window systems have been classified and explained their properties. In the simulation part, a reference office building has been modeled with each smart window system to evaluate their energy performances comparatively. Nevertheless, a reference office building with a traditional window system has also been modeled to reveal differences in energy performances with an available window system. Finally, the results have been evaluated with graphs and recommendations on the best-performed window system have been explained.

Today, supertall buildings can be constructed in unusual forms as a pragmatic reflection of advances in construction techniques and engineering technologies, together with advanced computational design tools for architectural design. As with many other buildings, architectural and practical principles play a crucial role in the form of a supertall building, where aerodynamic behavior shaped by wind-induced excitations also becomes a critical design input. Various methods are used to meet the functional needs of these towers and reduce excitations, including aerodynamic modification methods directly related to the building form. Tapered forms are one of the most frequently used and most effective methods in today's skyscrapers, which significantly affect architectural design. To date, no study has been conducted in the literature that provides an understanding of the interrelationships between tapered building forms and main planning criteria, considering the aerodynamic design concerns of the tapering effect in supertall buildings (≥300 m). This important issue is explored in this article with data gathered from 41 supertall case studies, considering location, function, structural system, and structural material as well as the aerodynamic taper effect. The main findings of the study highlighted the following: (1) Asia was where tapered towers were most favored, with a wider margin in all regions; (2) mixed-use was the most preferred function in selected supertall buildings with tapered form; (3) outriggered frame systems were mainly used; (4) tapered supertall cases were mostly built in composite; (5) the sample group included 17 cases that used the tapering effect with aerodynamic design concerns, some of which were accompanied by corner modifications. It is believed that this study will be a basic guide for design and construction professionals including architectural and structural designers, and contractors.

From the 1980s onwards, restructuring of economy and globalization has increased the size and number of companies in Istanbul and demand for modern office space which cannot be provided in the old CBD due to construction restrictions. Thus, multi-center development has started in the city in order to answer to the growing demand for modern office markets. The present study investigated the growth and decline of office rents in office markets which have highest demand and office rents. According to the results of the study, while office rents in the office markets with growth potential have increased, that of the markets with supply increased dramatically between 2011 and 2016. On the other hand, while office rents in all of the office markets were sharply declined in 2021 due to devaluation of Turkish Lira against USD. Although the pandemic has made Work from Home (WFH) and Hybrid working models a global trend, A class office demand stayed strong due to well-being requirements on office area. Thus, it is expected to have a positive impact on the economy of the city.

During the last two decades, Istanbul experienced rapid growth due to national and international migration. In addition, multi-center development of the city, construction of peripheral highways, bridges and metro systems have affected the economic, cultural and physical structure of the city. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the changes of the housing types and prices from the center to the periphery. While some of the fashionable neighborhoods lost their importance through time, some new neighborhoods became fashionable due to their modern buildings in the green areas. The great impact of Bosphourus and Marmara Sea shores amenities on the type and price of housing was emphasized. Economic development, globalization, restructuring and strategic locations have contributed to improve the quality of housing and to increase their prices. Due to increasing income gap, there is a widening difference between the types of low-income and upper-income housing.

Cities are in a continuous process with the change and re-adaptation of different parts. Cities are deliberately planned under different socio-economic, natural, religious, and political conditions in different historical periods. While cities are growing, new urban projects are planned that will affect urban morphology. Thus, the research problem is that new urban design projects require planning and integrated policy in interaction with the city. One of the aspects of ensuring this is examining the city from the historical point of view and comprehending urban morphology analysis. Within this framework, the Galata Region is chosen as the study area. The main reason for choosing the study area is; that it is thought the planning of the Galataport Project, the characteristics of the district and its impact should be questioned. Therefore, the study aims to first determine the change and development of the Galata Region over time with the Conzenian approach. In this section, historical maps of the area will be examined through the spatial development of the city, and the determination of the areas affected by the planning decisions will be revealed. Morphological region analysis will be done to identify the focus area boundary. Secondly, the aim is to reveal the impact of the Galataport Project on the region and on the use of the coastline by space syntax method. In this part, the effect of the Galataport Project will be explained comparatively by axiality, convexity, integration and intelligibility, and synergy concept through the 1980 and 2020 maps. As a result, it is seen that the study area has its spatial characteristics, cultural values, and historical process. In the general analysis of the area, it is seen that the old city center is seen as a high potential area for transformation due to its central location. The old city center plays a central role in the marketing of the city because of its economic potential. New design projects are done in the study area because of the transformation potential. It is observed that the Galataport project together with the morphological structure led to functional changes in the field and caused differences in the characteristics of the use of space. It has affected the area and old trading functions began to transform the leisure and tourism sector. Lastly, recommendations are given according to the results.

Educational buildings need to be properly built and renovated because of the number of users served, the rate of usage, the potential for energy savings, and their number in public buildings. Physically, educational buildings that do not meet the essential comfort conditions cause more energy consumption, have a negative effect on academic performance of students and also cause disruptions in educational program applications. According to 2021 data, there are approximately 67,000 school buildings in Turkey. A major portion of these buildings were constructed before 2000 and are now nearing the end of their economic life. It is essential to renew the insufficient buildings make them suitable for the conditions of the age. In this context, resilient systems that continue to function in a variety of negative conditions while maintaining comfort conditions become a priority in the design of the created environment. The lighting arrangements of educational buildings that are directly connected to visual comfort, academic performance, and energy consumption are discussed in this study. Within the framework of resilient design, certain suggestions have been developed in light of the current lighting standards in effect regarding the processes to be followed before the retrofit works to be performed in the lighting arrangements of the school buildings. These suggestions were discussed in three categories as short-, medium-, and long-term periods, taking into consideration the duration of the improvement processes and without interfering with the existing activities during the school education period and it was aimed to create a guide for designers and practitioners with the improvement systematics to be made in these periods. In order to test these suggestions, a classroom from the Ministry of National Education's type school projects is used as an example. The existing situation of the natural and artificial lighting system of this classroom and short-, medium- and long-term improvement suggestions were estimated through the Dialux Evo program. According to the findings, the recommended improvements enhanced visual comfort criteria and resulted in a considerable reduction in energy consumption. With the help of the improvement calendar, it is possible to modify the lighting systems of existing school buildings and increase visual performance.

In this study, the term resilience has been examined in terms of ecological, economic, and cultural parameters specific to residential areas. Recently, changing needs and increasing the speed of change due to developing technology are reflected as internal and external threats to residential areas. Change is inevitable for each parameter over time, but it can also pose a threat to the morphology and identity of residential areas. The buffer zone to be created by the residential areas against this threat reduces the severity of the incoming impact and revises it and provides the adaptation of identity and morphology dynamics to the new situation with its resilience. In the first part of the study, the identity of the settlements and the resilience factor against change/transformation threats are explained according to the definitions in the literature. In the second part, the dynamics of rural settlement morphology are defined and the effect of rural resistance on the dynamics is presented. In the last part, a stratification analysis is made according to certain year intervals over the Kargalı district (village) of the Polatlı District of Ankara. The sample was analyzed in terms of rural area, road traces, environmental location relations, structural boundaries, landmarks, and the changes/transformations of all these morphology dynamics over time, its resilience, and adaptation/mutation processes. The effects and possible results of the resilience of rural settlements for sustainable rural settlement, which are more affected by similar internal or external threats than urban, on the dynamics of settlement morphology and resident over time, constitute the desired findings of the study.

Today's cities are competitive in the process of globalization. Their survival depends on attracting as much capital as possible for the various productive, infrastructure, economic, political and social sectors. The more capital raised, the parts that use it also get improved in number and scale. The process of raising capital depends on the circumstances of each city. So that, in some cities, high demand leads to increase the capacity of economic infrastructure sectors, in others, they make demand by creating economic, social, infrastructure capacity and opportunities on a large scale. This is even more important for cities in developing countries as it helps them reach the development thresholds. Meanwhile, the Tehran (Iran) and Istanbul (Turkey) cities, due to their location, economic and political conditions, have always been challenged to attract capital. Therefore, in recent decades, they have started to make investment capacities by developing large-scale projects. This study aims to verify two of the most challenging large-scale projects in these two cities. To achieve the study’s goal, the projects and their types are first discussed. Also, the impact on the lands values in the neighboring area is evaluated as one of the existing effects on the host environment. The rate of impacts varies depending on the type of projects. According to the research findings, the essences of the two projects and the purposes of their constructions are different from each other. One attempts to attract as much capital as possible in order to show off its social and cultural capitals (Iran mall- Tehran), and the other aims at economic and political benefits in competition with similar projects. Regarding land prices, in addition to the fact that these two projects have caused significant increases in land values of the host districts, they have also transformed the social structure of the residents living there.

In 1992, the World Heritage Convention became the first international legal instrument recognize cultural landscapes as a human heritage that must be protected. The Cultural Landscape - Past, Present and Future considers different aspects of man's intervention with natural vegetation and the landscape resulting from a long equilibrium of co-existence. These landscapes are not stable, and the recent and ever accelerating changes in technology and life-style have increasingly affected many ancient landscapes, as old land-use practices are abandoned and traditions forgotten.(Birks et al., 1988) Human communities in desert areas formed a special landscape, providing these cultural landscapes within a special ecosystem of sustainable living conditions, which helped to create many social, economic, and cultural systems in addition to preserving biodiversity. Unfortunately, the cultural landscape in the African desert is constantly deteriorating under the influence of urban, economic, and social changes. In the southern Algerian Timimoun city of is one of the most important global desert touristic destination due to the natural cultural landscape characterizes it, but unfortunately this landscape in continuous deterioration. Agricultural landscapes of desert environment, with its remarkable knowledge culture and world of practices, must be seen as a living library where this knowledge is transferred from generation to generation. It seems certain that we will need more of the know-how stored in this living library in the near future, especially considering the effects of climate change we are experiencing today. The paper aims to identification of cultural landscapes in the oasis and analyses transformation and change in cultural landscape and traditional green infrastructure elements by relying on a historical analysis of spatial images based on quantitative analysis using ArcGIS software with the aim of identifying the real reasons of this deterioration in the urban cultural landscape in desert cites we will propose an action strategy to prevent this degradation.

Societies have reflected their cultures and lifestyles through the environment they have shaped. This is also true for minority groups in society. Environmental problems arise due to the use of all resources for cheap and fast production without considering the result of technological developments. Changes in nature, which form the basis of many disaster scenarios, also require urgent measures to be taken in many areas. Efforts should be made to minimize the damage to the environment. In this context, as in many other fields, the number of studies on ecology and sustainability in the field of architecture is increasing day by day. Ecological building designs are the most important reflection of this. In this direction, the development of certification systems and the promotion of ecological structures come to the fore. The research looks at the concepts of ecology and sustainability from a different perspective and traces the ecological architecture through a residential building belonging to minorities that can be qualified as a historical cultural heritage and located in the Yukarı Talas locality of Talas district of Kayseri. In order to produce sustainable designs in places where life is lived, it is considered important to consider the way in which human beings shape the environment in which they live in the historical process, also in minority architecture. Within the scope of the study, the mansion in Talas, Kayseri, which was built in the 19th century and passed from an Armenian family to a Turkish family in the process, was evaluated within the scope of today's ecological architecture criteria and it was found that a significant part of these criteria was met in this building. The mansion is discussed in terms of ecology, energy, economy, indoor environmental quality, health and welfare, innovation, management, land use, transportation, renewable technology, water, environmental pollution, CO2 emission, material and waste criteria. In the study; It has been determined that there are ecological approaches to the historical minority mansion. With reference to the findings, suggestions have been developed to produce ecological, nature-friendly and energy efficient structures for today and the future.

According to the Index of Risk Management-INFORM 2020 Report, Turkey was included in the group of “high-risk” countries in terms of humanitarian crises and disasters with an index score of 5.0 in 2019. In statistics related to the damage caused by disasters, it is known that natural disasters cause a 3% loss in Turkey's gross national product every year, and this rate approaches 4-5% with indirect losses. Since disasters cause socioeconomic, physical, and institutional losses, attention has been given to the importance of disaster management and risk reduction studies. This paper focuses on vulnerability assessments and presents a multi-criteria decision-making and earthquake-related vulnerability assessment method by using physical and socioeconomic parameters in the Historic Peninsula. A Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method was applied in this study because vulnerability assessments are complex and depend on many different criteria. Due to its flexible structure, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is one of the MCDM methods widely used in urban vulnerability assessment studies, was preferred and integrated with Geographic Information Systems. As a result of the study, it is found that approximately 49% of the district is at a moderate vulnerability level in terms of socioeconomic characteristics. For the structural characteristics, this rate is found to be at a high vulnerability level of 93%. The remaining 7% is moderately vulnerable. In this context, emphasis should be placed on identifying risky structures and strengthening and renovating them in the Historic Peninsula. The results of the method proposed in this study can be used as a basis for risk reduction studies. In addition, it can be a guide in pre-disaster risk reduction studies and can be integrated into city planning processes to keep disaster damage at minimum levels and predict the damage that may occur in settlements. The proposed method is a low-cost and short-term analysis that can be used, especially in public institutions that lack a technologically qualified workforce.

Set aside the issues concerning their excavation, documentation, and conservation, as far as their presentation to the public experience is concerned, Archaeological sites represent a special case of cultural heritage that come with distinctive set of conditions and demands, posing a problem situation deserving a special treatment. Problem is manifold: The presentation should be informative, entertaining, and educational, all accomplished through an active corporeal and mental participation where interactivity and immersion must be the key. The setting must provide a holistic, comprehensible experience by completing “missing parts and layers,” and contextualizing it, perhaps through a story, a theme, or a background. Any intervention must be non-invasive, reversible and updateable; alternatives and different layers must be presented, preferably, synchronously. Above all, final setting should be subordinate to the primacies of “conservation of cultural heritage,” while providing an intellectually and physically accessible and sustainable overall historical environment. This has been an age-old issue for the scholars, a genuine challenge due to the ill-defined nature of the problem situation itself. The present study departs from the proposition that, Augmented Reality(AR), by definition, has a potential to contribute to such a problem situation. AR is a combination of real and virtual worlds, where “virtual” could complement what was missing in the real and new objects and layers might be woven together, into one new reality where active bodily and mental participation and interaction is possible. Though it might seem implied in the definition, the proposition still needs a rigorous investigation since AR is a rapidly emerging but still quite a young field that has a long way to go; and since, research on AR’s specific adoption to presentation of archaeological sites, apart from few examples, is still an unbeaten path. The present multidisciplinary study aims to take a step towards such an investigation. Established upon a detailed investigation and analysis of examples, the present study involves development of an AR application of a selected case: “Alexandria Troas Podium Temple,” followed by a field study. In the present report, we share our experience and observations of the process and the implementation. In conclusion, we propose that AR is a serious candidate to be a considerable asset for the presentation of archaeological sites for the visitor experience, without compromising the universal norms of conservation of cultural heritage. We also argue that AR seems to have its own agenda, coming with unprecedented possibilities still to be appreciated and adopted, which in turn might help us to go beyond the conventional conceptions and modes of conservation of cultural heritage and presentation.

While environmental, economical and social challenges that the world has been facing recently are increasing dramatically; cities have played critical role in generation many of these problems like negative impacts on environment and overconsumption of resources. Most of the cities today face severe sustainability challenges including sanitation, air pollution, environmental degradation, over population and lack of livability. However, cities may also raise answers to find solutions against many of such complex urban problems, since they are assumed as creative and innovative platforms for social ecosystem of ideas. In this sense, there is increasing interest in ‘City Laboratories’ or ‘Urban Living Labs’, which are established to provide creative experimental platforms with participation of city actors to discuss urban sustainability issues before implementation of deep and structural urban changes for citizens. They provide participatory, co-creative and experimental platforms for self-organizing cities. The aim of this paper is to discuss a collaborative City Laboratory approach -Mersin City Lab- to achieve sustainability principles during urban regeneration process for the selected case-study area located in Mersin. Mersin City Lab focuses on two aspects: Firstly, ‘City Lab’ approach, involves citizens and stakeholders into decision-making process. Secondly, it focuses on urban transformation process with circularity principles including water, mobility, energy, waste management, food and circular economy to achieve sustainable neighborhood development. The paper starts with introduction of ‘city-gaming’ methodology which has been adopted as the main structure of participation of multi-stakeholders. It continues with discussions on stages of the case-study project through implementation of workshops and game sessions by participation of multi stake-holders. Following, the results gathered from overall evaluations of participants’ proposals regarding land-use, mobility and urban water management, local economy, urban development, urban agriculture and food strategies in neighborhood level are discussed. Finally, the paper concludes with impacts of City Labs approach and city-gaming methodology on decision-making process for real urban problems and urban settings.

The intrinsic relationship between art and the public has changed as public art has greater visibility in contemporary urban space. Especially following the growing interest in placemaking in spatial planning and design, many cities in different countries tend to experience an unprecedented transformation of urban space displaying various modes of artistic performances open for the public. As a visual art, the mural could be considered one of the leading creative activities in the cities' public domain. The ever-increasing popularity of murals as public artwork made the local governments tend to introduce some programs to steer the performance of the art within the very spatial condition of the city fabric. Along with its vivid cosmopolitan culture, Istanbul has performed as the cultural hub of the contemporary arts located both indoor (the various size of galleries) and the city's outdoor spaces. As one of the central neighborhoods in Kadıköy district in İstanbul, Yeldeğirmeni, represents a very relevant context to investigate the issue public art in urban space. Having accommodated an international mural festival in 2012, the district has turned into an experimental site for various mural practices. The extent of the art in the urban space calls for morphological research to test the perceptual performance of the artwork in terms of the characteristics of the physical fabric in which the murals locate. The paper, in this context, conducts a spatial analysis focusing on network integration, visibility, and townscape characteristics of the neighborhood fabric. The research findings are correlated with the level of recognition of the murals by the public to reveal the conditional relationship between the spatial morphology and the perceptional capacity of the murals as public art.

Capital cities have a major role in carrying the symbolic meanings of their countries. Planning decisions and historical periods affect their urban forms and development processes. This research examines the morphological evaluation of Ankara—the capital city of Turkey—and provides an approach to understanding its unique physical structure. Ankara has witnessed strategically important planning periods through its history that are reflected in its urban form. The historical periods affecting the developing process of the capital city are analyzed through a mathematical method called "Space Syntax" which contributes to the field of urban morphology with a quantitative perspective. The analytical framework investigates the changing process of Ankara's unique urban axis and morphological structure. Its different historical periods show that the capital city is constantly changing. Ankara's monumental city axis, which shows its traces since the formation of the city, still exists today. However, this unique axis, which connects the historical core areas of the capital city, has lost its potential today. Due to economic and political demands, the main axis, namely Atatürk Boulevard, has been replaced by a newly formed western artery. Understanding Ankara's forming and changing process will enhance its subsequent development plans. By evaluating a unique capital city from Turkey with a morphological perspective, this research will contribute an approach to future studies.

Urban form in Shkodër is studied according to six stages during the period 1479-1913, which are reconstructed based on historical descriptions, maps, photographs, and the spatial interpretation of the Venetian cadastral registry in 1416. Like other Ottoman cities in the Balkans, the old quarters in Shkodër evolved by preserving the original medieval street network, while the new part of the city grew by expanding suburbs with dendritic street patterns and large plots along existing intercity arterial roads. The unique location of the city confined by hilly ranges and surrounded by three rivers and a lake produced a distinctive urban form due to the position of the external bazaar and the crisscrossing of arterial roads. The comparative space syntax analysis of the street network for each stage reveals a gradual transformation in the spatial structure of the city broken by two stark changes: during the early Ottoman period when the bazaar became distinctively more central in comparison to the living quarters, and after the opening of new boulevards during the late Ottoman period when the new urban center that emerged in the new city drew the spatial integration away from the historical bazaar.

Building Back Better in disaster recovery and reconstruction requires the adoption of integrated and context-sensitive approaches to the design and planning of Temporary Housing (TH) sites. However, there is a lack of methods for enabling successful outcomes in housing assistance provision, e.g. via a quantitative evaluation of the social-spatial qualities of the sites, and supporting the negotiation of urban design changes and the development of a coherent end-of-life plan. The paper aims to uncover formal analogies between different TH sites’ layouts by linking Space Syntax and Clustering analysis within an unsupervised machine-learning pipeline, which can consider a virtually unlimited number of configurational qualities and how they vary across different scales. The potential benefits of the proposal are illustrated through its application to the study of 20 TH sites built in Norcia after the 2016-2017 Central Italy earthquakes. The results indicate the proposal enables distinguishing different types of spatial arrangements according to local strategic priorities and suggest the opportunity to extend the study in the future to set up rules of thumb for the design of site layout options. The paper ultimately aims to equip local administrations and contracted professionals with a much-needed tool to develop and rapidly audit proposals for temporary neighbourhoods oriented at enhancing the resilience of disaster-affected towns both in the medium and in the long term.

What is the right location for a university campus? Universities have a preponderant role in today’s societal models. They have been in the core of development — economic, social, sustainable, inter alia — and their role within urban context has changed in order to respond to the university mission — that nowadays includes of civic engagement as well as a stronger participation in economies, through the development of startups and innovation ecosystems. This paper relies on the premise that, even in a post-pandemic world, the Campus is still a window to the world, it can shape the perception people have of the University, can be used as a branding asset and, most of all, impacts the lives of everyone living, learning, and working there. The Campus is a very powerful tool, one that universities worldwide have been using as a way of positioning themselves, of attracting students and faculty, and also creating synergies and relationships with companies. It shapes the relationships created inside and outside of it. As such, this research argues that universities can be key elements in generating and enabling dynamic synergies, promoting the presence of students, academics, and learning spaces in urban contexts. To accomplish this, universities should preserve their spatial identity and uniqueness, while guaranteeing the existence of adequate places for all learning related activities and embodying inclusion and sustainable development, promoting encounters and interaction. These two needs, for inclusion and livelihood while safeguarding some privacy coexist creating some tension for all campus users. With this issue in mind, this paper explores an analytical framework for university campuses within urban fabrics, understanding the different types of urban insertion and connections established with local and regional players, and exploring the dichotomy between closeness centrality and betweenness centrality, as variables than can be used to balance the tension between integration and privacy that affects university campuses and academic communities worldwide. Four compact university campuses that host similar functions are used to test the methodology: Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada; Aalto University in Espoo, Finland; MIT in Cambridge, MA, USA; and Yale University, in New Haven, USA. This paper relies on syntactic analysis to provide deeper information and some clarification on the university location and accessibility within the urban fabrics.