Environmental Pressures and Policy Responses on the Lycian Way: Towards Sustainable Cultural Route Management
The Landscapes Across the Mediterranean (CrossMED) 2nd Edition, Granada, İspanya, 9 - 11 Aralık 2025, ss.102, (Özet Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
- Basıldığı Şehir: Granada
- Basıldığı Ülke: İspanya
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.102
- Gazi Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Due to its social, ecological, and political significance, the geography of the Mediterranean and Anatolia (in West Asia) has historically served as a crossroads for civilizations and intercultural exchange. One of the region’s unique cultural landscapes, the Lycian Way, is a 540-kilometer hiking trail along the southern coast of Türkiye. First introduced to international hiking communities in 1999 by Kate Clow, the route has since become a significant cultural and touristic destination (Clow, 2015). Traversing ancient cities of Lycian Civilization, rural settlements, and coastal ecosystems, it includes key archaeological sites such as Xanthos, Patara, and Olympos, as well as tourism-driven coastal towns and ecologically sensitive areas. As ICOMOS (2008) emphasizes, cultural routes are not merely physical paths but dynamic structures that integrate tangible and intangible heritage. In this context, the Lycian Way faces growing threats to its authenticity and integrity from urbanization, mass tourism, deforestation, and inadequate protective regulations. Over the past three decades, studies have also documented rapid greenhouse expansion, tourism-driven urbanization, and pressures on coastal and archaeological sites in the region (Sünbül & Tonyaloğlu Ersoy, 2021; Erdoğan & Kuter, 2010). This study examines the types, distribution, and temporal changes of environmental pressures along the Lycian Way, utilizing remote sensing and GIS. A one-kilometer-wide corridor was assessed using Landsat imagery at 30-meter resolution (1999, 2009, 2019, 2025), with supervised land-use/land-cover (LULC) classification and categorical change detection performed in ArcGIS Pro. The findings indicate that the trail faces substantial spatial transformation pressures, varying across different segments of the route. The pressures of tourism-driven urbanization and greenhouse-based agriculture illustrate the dual challenge of balancing cultural landscape conservation with regional development dynamics in Mediterranean contexts. The study highlights the significance of preserving the Lycian Way as a cultural route and evaluates international conservation strategies grounded in frameworks established by the Council of Europe, ICOMOS, and UNESCO. It proposes a governance-oriented conservation model grounded in spatial data, contributing to the intersection of cultural heritage, planning, and sustainability in Mediterranean landscapes.