Urban Development and Planning in Istanbul

This special issue of International Planning Studies offers a set of papers addressing urban development issues in Istanbul. It is published in parallel with a Turkish version, in the e-journal Megaron (2011, Vol. 6, No. 1). Megaron is based in Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul, and is edited by Dr Yiğit Evren.

The papers gathered here focus on the transformation of the social and spatial structure that has been underway in Istanbul since the end of the last century. They offer a range of perspectives on the dynamics of what in English is called ‘Urban Regeneration’. In much of Western Europe and North America, the age of ‘Urban Regeneration’ was officially announced in the mid-1990s. It reflected a shift towards urban-focused economic strategy-making, the rise of new urban consumer groups, and the diversion of capital from industrial investment to asset markets and property development. Since the recession of 2008 brought an end to the credit-fuelled house price boom, ‘Urban Regeneration’ has lost its lustre. For many it is now discredited. The promises held out in its name generally failed to materialize, and the built environment engineered in its name has often turned out to be superficial and unsustainable, socially divisive, and of dubious architectural and urban design value. Owen Hatherley (2010) mocks urban regeneration in Britain – dominated by architects, urban designers, large-scale developers, property financiers, and local politicians desperately seeking a ‘competitive image’ – as the hyped-up architecture of Blairism.

But if urban regeneration has lost credibility in its western homelands, in Turkey it is still fashionable, especially amongst those with access to State power and investment capital. And the measures introduced in the name of regeneration, or renewal, are rapidly transforming the look of at least the central parts of many Turkish cities. This is energetically promoted by a powerful minority, but it is vigorously resisted, both in theory and in practice, by others. The sheer scale of regeneration proposals, especially in Istanbul, is breathtaking and raises major questions about economic viability, justice, and sustainability. The papers in this special issue throw light on these questions by providing a range of insights into the current urban transformation in Istanbul. Taken as a whole, the collection draws attention to the impact of the global trend to use state power to promote the development of property markets and to ‘normalize’ market-oriented behaviours. It also draws attention to the highly specific ways in which this agenda has been imported and adapted to local circumstances and interest groups in Turkey.

Readers unfamiliar with Turkey will need to bear in mind in some crucial specificities of the Turkish urban development and planning environment. These include: the exceptionally centralized nature of the Turkish state (current measures to establish ‘regional development agencies’ do not imply a decentralization of policy-making); the chronically weak labour market (getting on for half the employment in Istanbul falls in the ‘informal’ sector; the growth of jobs has not kept pace with the growth of population; the city has the worst female participation rate in Europe); the clientelistic political culture; the intense poverty of large swathes of society, especially women, alongside the emergence of an affluent conspicuously-consuming urban new middle class; the powerful but secretive role of religious networks and their leaders; and the uncritical ‘cheerleader’ function played by most of the mainstream media, especially television. While these represent ‘anti-democratic’ tendencies, they are offset to some degree by more ‘democratic’ ones. Turkey is a poor and divided country, but it has a sophisticated constitution. This gives special status to peak representative organizations, such as the Chambers of Architects, Chamber of Planners, and others. These organizations play a major role in mediating or modifying planning proposals originating with central government or private developers. Disputes over planning issues, of which there are many, regularly find their way to the courts for legal adjudication.

This complex structure, together with recent political changes, means that urban development in Turkey is today at the front-line of potentially conflicting forces. On the one hand, an ascendant neo-liberal, neo-Ottoman, market-oriented clientelist State, in which the most powerful individuals have a personal stake in development and are closely networked with development interests, generates or transmits a flood of development proposals and advocates. On the other, the legalistic apparatus inherited from earlier stages in the development of the Turkish Republic, plus a tradition of democratic practice and beliefs, embodied in an educated middle class (in which many planners and architects are notably more conscious of the progressive social–reformist traditions of their disciplines than in many European countries), acts as a bulwark against hasty development. All of the papers here, in different ways, demonstrate that these institutional and political–cultural specificities have important effects on the way urban development is imagined, practiced, and resisted, in Istanbul.

The Papers

The first paper by Enlil describes the development of Istanbul in a broad historical perspective and sets the geographical context for the papers that follow. Enlil unpacks the spatial evolution of Istanbul in terms of three broad historical phases; Shrinking City (1800–1950), Exploding City (1950–1980) and Fragmented City (post 1980s). She demonstrates the crucial connections between the changing urban form and the wider social and political context, as a result of which, she argues, Istanbul has now become a patchwork of disintegrated functions.

The next paper by Oktem highlights one aspect of this disintegration by examining the way a ‘global’ policy discourse was used by successive local governments to rationalize a very particular approach to urban development and planning. This stressed the promotion of a ‘global image’ especially in architecture and marketing. The focus of the article is Maslak, the ostentatiously pseudo-American new central business district office district of Istanbul that is visible everywhere in the city thanks to its skyscrapers.

In the following paper, Dincer examines recent regeneration proposals in what was the central business district in Ottoman and early Republican times, in areas that have undergone extreme deindustrialization. Focusing on the impact of the enactment of Law on Renewal 5366, she demonstrates the diversity of the ways local municipalities have made the use of the legal framework. Her account draws on case studies of renewal areas in Sulukule, Tarlabasi, Suleymaniye and Fener-Balat.

The next paper by Turkun unpacks the institutional dynamics behind the creation of the urban coalitions that have shaped the content of ‘regeneration’ in these and other areas. She reveals the construction of a hegemonic discourse in favour of a new wave of urban development oriented to the market, and the way this has marginalized the problems of residents of the former squatter areas – the ‘Gecekondu’. The paper explores the legislative and institutional forms through which neoliberal urban development principles have been implemented, focusing on the new regeneration laws and the unique institution known as TOKİ, the State Mass Housing Agency. This has become the key player in regeneration, and in social displacement.

The following paper by Lovering and Turkmen focuses in on the way recent regeneration plans centred on TOKİ impact on the communities in the areas targeted. It sets the relationship between state and urban community in the context of the global spread of ‘Authoritarian Neoliberalism’. In the Turkish case this is characterized by an alliance between a neo-Ottoman ‘strong man’ style of governance and the neo-liberal promotion of property rights and markets. Three case studies illustrate the way poor residents of squatter areas are subjected to coercive pressures to make the land they occupy available for market-oriented development. But they also reveal the diversity of local responses, and the contingent nature of final outcomes. This suggest that the top-down approach adopted in Istanbul is unlikely to smoothly bring about the Market-Islamic urban Utopia that its advocates desire.

The final paper by Evren and Okten adds important insights into the connections between the development of markets, the socio-cultural institutions within which they are embedded, and spatiality, which make Istanbul so distinctive amongst large European cities. Focusing on major hospitals in Istanbul, they show how economic districts have emerged spontaneously as a result of the deregulation of market in medical care and products in the context of low income levels, and cultural traditions of healthcare, and ‘traditional’ family and gender relations. The intimate connections that the paper reveals between the political, the economic, and the cultural are of relevance beyond the medical case. For they are also central to the success of the approach adopted by the State to urban regeneration, and to the response of local communities.

This Special Issue

Our decision to commission this collection for International Planning Studies and Megaron was motivated by the wish to bring the under-examined Istanbul case to a wider international planning audience. For what happens in Istanbul is only partly distinctive: most of the ideas, processes, and outcomes described in this issue will be recognized by readers in Asia, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and even in Western Europe and North America as having powerful local echoes. Istanbul is not the only city in which planning is partisan, favouring globally advantaged minority groups and their interests. Nor is it the only megalopolis in which the implication of current development trends can only be described as disastrous. The vision that currently dominates planning in and for Istanbul fails to recognize the importance of justice, of social inclusion and sustainability, and of the physical environment. But very similar visions (and the hierarchical power structures behind them) can be found behind the promotion of ‘regeneration' and ‘global competitiveness' in many other cities (Harvey, 2008).

This collection makes available to international readers some of the most exciting research on urban development in Istanbul, most of which has not hitherto been available in the English language. Several of the authors here represent the rising generation in Turkish planning studies. The issues that their papers raise are of significance not only for Istanbul, Europe's only mega-city, but for cities everywhere.