The strange case of earthquake risk mitigation in Istanbul

Abstract

As an aspiring global city, Istanbul is at the crossroads of capital, political struggle, and socioeconomic transformation. Unfortunately, Istanbul is also at the crossroads of major active fault lines. This paper analyzes earthquake risk mitigation planning for the megacity since the last big seismic catastrophe of the Marmara Earthquakes in 1999 that hit the region, including Istanbul. We use the concept of riskscape to explore the political and technocratic construction of seismic risk and how this implies different experiences of risk to investment portfolios, the state, and the ordinary people living in the city. Our empirical analyses focus on the ‘Istanbul Seismic Risk Mitigation and Emergency Preparedness Project’ (ISMEP), launched as a World Bank project in 2005 and still ongoing as of 2020. We argue that the ISMEP project epitomizes the ‘strange case’ of earthquake risk mitigation in Istanbul due to its organizational complexity, financial expansion over its lifetime, and progression as a megaproject sponsored by international development funding despite its contraction in institutional targets. Our findings suggest that this centralized and non-transparent earthquake risk mitigation approach in Istanbul creates a fragmented riskscape for the megacity. The earthquake risk continues to threaten millions of inhabitants’ lives and livelihoods while making room for speculative real estate development.

Keywords:

• riskscape
• risk mitigation
• megaproject
• earthquake
• Istanbul
• international development funding
• disaster planning

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and comments, to the City Editors who helped us to refine our arguments and prepare our manuscript for publication, and to Dr. Robert B. Olshansky and Dr. Mehmet Penpecioglu for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See “Association of Turkish Architects in Private Practice” for details: http://en.megaprojeleristanbul.com/

2 JICA plan’s page numbers are organized according to the sections within the report. The first digit in the page number indicates the section number and the second digit indicates the page number within that particular section.

3 The Turkish Lira has sharply depreciated in the last year. When the ISMEP project started in 2005, Euro/Turkish Lira exchange rate was less than 2, whereas in November 2020 the Euro/ Turkish Lira exchange rate is close to 10. In a volatile economy like Turkey, borrowing in foreign currency constitutes high financial risk on its own.

4 President Erdogan has a symbolic importance for issues related to planning in Istanbul. His first political victory in his career as a politician was to become the Mayor of Istanbul in 1994, which he served for one term. He later became the prime minister, then the president, and with the constitutional changes pushed by his party, he is armed with almost unconstrained authority as a president. See https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/opinion/erdogan-turkey-elections.html for further information.

5 In the aftermath of the change in Metropolitan Municipality’s office in 2019, the municipality has recently become more active in earthquake risk mitigation planning efforts and updated the earthquake and potential loss scenarios for the whole metropolitan area (IBB 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deniz Ay

Deniz Ay is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Institute of Geography at University of Bern. Email: [email protected]

Basak Demires Ozkul

Basak Demires Ozkul is an Associate Professor in the Urban and Regional Planning Department at Istanbul Technical University. Email: [email protected]