A diagnostic visual-analytic method, developed through doctoral research.
Built to examine how different forms of heritage continuity, action, recognition, and authority become distributed across a place. It is a diagnostic framework, not a prescriptive scoring system.
This page sets out what the Framework is, what it takes as its unit of analysis, how it is applied, what it makes visible, and—equally important—what it does not claim to do. It is written to be usable by a municipality, an institution, an NGO, a design team, a researcher, or a student, without requiring a dissertation to be read first.
Heritage theory has expanded considerably. It now recognizes lived practice, memory, use, care, and other relational and unofficial forms of continuity alongside material fabric. That expansion is broadly accepted in principle.
The instruments have not expanded with it. Inventories, assessments, condition surveys, and decision procedures still tend to do one of two things: organize continuity into categories that sit beside one another without being comparable, or privilege what is already procedurally legible—bounded, documented, officially recognized.
The consequence is practical rather than theoretical. When priorities, boundaries, and budgets are set, the forms of continuity that are hardest to document are also the ones least likely to be in view.
Before we ask how to preserve a place, we ask how to know it.
The Framework responds to that gap. It does not add another category. It provides a single field in which material and immaterial, unofficial and official acts can be positioned together and compared.
Two intersecting continua define the analytic field.
Tangibility runs vertically, from material to immaterial. Authority runs horizontally, from unofficial to official. Every documented act takes a position somewhere in the resulting field.
These are continua, not binary categories. An act is rarely purely material or purely immaterial, purely unofficial or purely official. Position expresses relative orientation along each continuum—whether an act is carried more through material form or enacted practice, and whether its authorization is more institutional or informal—rather than membership in a fixed class.
It follows that the four quadrants are accumulation fields, not four types of heritage. They are regions where acts gather. Their names are coordinates, not labels for what heritage is. Nothing belongs to a quadrant permanently; acts move as conditions change.
Each documented act is placed through evidence-based qualitative judgment: by the act’s primary carrier along tangibility and its mode of authorization along authority. Relative distance is not a numerical measure. Counts record documented acts within the evidence corpus; they do not rank value, importance, public reach, or institutional weight. Interpretive does not mean arbitrary. Positions must be transparent in their reasoning, contestable on their evidence, and consistent in their use of the stated criteria.
The Framework positions documented acts.
This is the decisive methodological commitment. It does not classify buildings, communities, rituals, or heritage objects. It positions specific acts—things done, recorded, and evidenced—which means the resulting field is built from what can be shown rather than from what is assumed about a place.
An act enters the analytic field only through evidence appropriate to the study: field observation, spatial and photographic documentation, institutional and archival records, and other documented material, defined at the outset of the research.
The consequence is a discipline of proportion. Where no recoverable evidence is found within the study's defined evidentiary threshold, a field may remain thin or empty. That absence becomes diagnostic only after systematic search across relevant source types; it is not proof that no heritage act occurred.
Time is the implicit third axis. A heritage condition is not static, and a single map is a single moment.
Read serially, the same field shows movement: accumulation fields thicken or thin, acts migrate toward or away from formal authority, and forms of continuity that were present in one moment become absent in the next.
An initial distribution across the field.
Density gathers in one region; another thins.
Acts migrate; a previously empty region registers.
The sequence is deliberately plain. The expertise is not in the diagram.
The reading itself proceeds through five analytical operations:
Where documented acts concentrate, and what that concentration is composed of.
Where the field is thin or empty—and whether that indicates a condition, a limit of evidence, or a limit of recognition.
Where one form of continuity relies on another to remain legible, accessible, or supported.
How unevenly the field is occupied, and along which axis the unevenness runs.
How the distribution thickens, thins, or migrates from one moment to the next.
The method is not "draw four boxes and place things inside." The professional work lies in defining the study boundary, selecting and evaluating evidence of unequal standing, justifying each position, comparing distributions across sites and moments, and interpreting what the resulting field means for the place in question.
Applied to a real site, the Framework can show:
Visibility is analytically useful, but it is not completeness. What becomes documented, mapped, or institutionally legible is only part of the relations through which a place is lived. The Framework is used as an analytical instrument, not as a complete representation of a place.
Because its function is diagnostic, the Framework can enter a project at any stage where decisions about scope, priority, and care are being made.
Establishing what is already present in the field before priorities, boundaries, and funding decisions are fixed.
Testing whether different forms of continuity are entering the project field, or only the ones easiest to document.
Tracking how the distribution of acts and forms of care changes as intervention proceeds.
Assessing what was recognized, sustained, displaced, or left outside the intervention.
Beyond project stages, the method is also usable in research, in education and teaching, in institutional dialogue where different parties need a shared field of reference, and in community-facing work where what is already being carried needs to be made visible alongside what is formally recorded.
Stating the limits is part of the method.
Its function is diagnostic: to produce a more adequate shared field of visibility before and during decision-making. The aim is not a complete picture, but a more precise one.
The Framework was developed to be portable across cases, but Antakya remains its first full empirical application. Its analytic range beyond this context is a question for subsequent comparative applications.
The Four-Quadrant Framework was developed by Çiçek Karataş Yıldırım through doctoral research.
A Four-Quadrant Framework for Cultural Preservation: Mapping Relational Dynamics in Heritage Practice
Çiçek Karataş Yıldırım
Because framing questions, selecting evidence, and interpreting relationships are situated acts, the researcher's position remains explicit within the work. That position informs the inquiry but does not substitute for methodological transparency or evidentiary support.
Antakya, after rupture: two damaged sacred sites read comparatively and across time—the empirical application through which the method’s diagnostic capacity was examined.