Use of Water in Islamic Gardens and Sustainable Examples in the UNESCO World Heritage List

Abstract

This study aims to explore the relationship between cultural landscapes, Islamic gardens, wa- ter-sensitive cultural heritages, and sustainability seeking to capture a multilayered understanding of sus- tainable land use-scape techniques that these cultures could develop over time through their creative and elaborative interaction with water. This study handles an eight-phased evaluation process involving collab- oration between text mining technology, UNESCO documents, and literature reviews. Benefitting from the official documents and query engine of the UNESCO World List, 16 cultural landscapes from 5 countries are selected and then examined by Voyant Tools- text mining technology based on the data UNESCO de- clared about them. Water-based landscape components, techniques, approaches, and terms that are ex- tracted for each of the sites are supported by scholarly readings to lead to a qualified comparison between the heritage sites and countries. Comparative studies followed by the identification of the unified landscape system formed by the collective data of the heritage sites. The terms related to water-based techniques and rural landscapes are more commonly used than those pertaining to architectural features. This trend can be seen in terms such as oasis, palm, agriculture, qanat, irrigation, river, and hydraulic. Although water has always had a spiritual dimension, considering the environmental challenges related to water, it is seen that technical issues related to accessing water and using it sustainably clearly come to the fore according to the evaluations of the historical spatial patterns and implementations. Focusing on the necessity to develop adaptive spatial studies, this study is an attempt to further water-sensitive landscape architecture studies for the benefit of sustainability.

Keywords

• Water-sensitive Studies
• Islamic Garden
• Cultural Landscape
• Text-mining
• UNESCO
• Sustain- ability

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