The Role of Design in Cultural Heritage Based City Branding of Beypazari

In recent years, countries around the world have been replacing national promotion with images of certain cities and determining branding strategies to promote themselves and to compete with other cities. As a result of these strategies, cities have stepped up to positioning themselves like products and conducted studies to market themselves as products. In those branding studies, they especially use their cultural and industrial heritage to apart themselves from other cities. From this point of view, 15 cities were selected for city branding studies in 2008 in the context of ‘Brand City Project’ which is conducted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in order to accelerate the culture tourism. Declaration of one city every year as "Cultural Tourism City," restoration of structures with cultural and architectural qualities and ruins, development of local activities up to international standards, construction of facilities and spaces to perform cultural and artistic shows, raising public awareness of the value and preservation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage and international promotion and marketing are among the targets of Urban Scale Branding Strategy for the year 2023. In this study, the city branding process which leads to the rising of cities as new economic assets, the stakeholders which involved in that process, and the role of design, will be discussed. As the foreign examples were being examined, it was determined that different branches of design, such as graphic design, web design, product design, service design and urban design were taking parts in this branding process. In this study, Beypazarı, which has a significant economic income with its crafts, industry and agriculture, but much rather promote its mansions and local foods and come up with its culture tourism, is handled. In the field study of Beypazarı, qualitative research methods such as literature review, observation, document analysis, semi-structured interviews and photo shoots were used. In the conclusion part of the study, the data obtained were analyzed and whether the branding strategies provide positive value or not to the city and the contribution of design were evaluated.