A morphological framework for delineating character areas in a coastal town: The case of Görele, Türkiye

Urban morphology has long sought to translate the historical, environmental, and built-form structure of settlements into legible units that planning can act on. In practice, however, the connection between morphological analysis and planning has remained limited, particularly in topographically differentiated small towns where standard density controls fail to fully address the distinct character of areas that are formed through topography, historical development, and built form. This paper develops a method for delineating character areas within a historico-geographical framework that is applicable to planning practice. The method synthesizes three groups of analysis: historical development, natural environmental structure, and built form and land use, to delineate different character areas of the urban landscape. The rural-to-urban transect was then applied as a secondary assessment to question the character area classification. The method is applied to Görele, a small coastal town in northeastern Türkiye, selected for its topography and traceable urban development history since the start of the Republican era in 1923. After the synthesis, nine character areas are defined in Görele, each shaped by a specific overlay of development history, natural setting, plot pattern, density, and building form. Non-parametric tests confirm that the areas differ significantly in plot area, ground space index, floor area ratio, and number of storeys. A Spearman rank correlation along the main rural-to-urban sequence shows that plot size decreases and density values increase toward the urban core, but areas with similar density values can differ substantially in plot pattern, street structure, and historical depth. The findings show that character area delineation provides a more differentiated basis for planning than density categories alone and identifies areas where high-density development has occurred without adequate integration with the urban context. In coastal towns shaped by constraining topography and historical development, this approach can guide density control toward more adaptive and contextual urban planning.