Garden House (Dam) settlements in Malatya, Turkey

The settlements in Turkey are various in terms of their shapes, types and materials. As an countryside type of housing, dams are found in eastern and southeastern Anatolia as well as the Central Anatolia and Aegean Regions of Turkey. Such types of housing, namely the dams, vary in terms of their roots, their durations of usage, the economic activities there and their physical structures according to the effect of the geographical region in which they are located.The way the concept of dam is used varies from a region to another, meaning some different things in each. It is therefore that the geography scholars in our country use this concept to mean different types of settlement. Naturally, there are significant differences between the dams in the Central Anatolia and the ones in the other regions.Our field of research in this study, the dam settlements is a result of the economic activities led in the region and bears a characteristic and original quality for Turkey, particularly the eastern Anatolia. This article deals with the dam settlements in Turkey and specifically analyses the dam settlements around the city of Malatya as representative of the ones in the eastern Anatolia, trying on the other hand to account for its significance in the rapidly-changing economic structure of Turkey.