International Planning Studies

ISSN: 1356-3475 (Print) 1469-9265 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cips20

Urban Development and Planning in Istanbul

John Lovering & Yigit Evren

To cite this article: John Lovering & Yigit Evren (2011) Urban Development and Planning in
Istanbul, International Planning Studies, 16:1, 1-4, DOI: 10.1080/13563475.2011.552471

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2011.552471

Published online: 26 Mar 2011.

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International Planning Studies
Vol. 16, No. 1, 1 – 4, February 2011

EDITORIAL

Urban Development and Planning

in Istanbul

JOHN LOVERING∗ & YIGIT EVREN∗∗

∗
Cardiff School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff, UK; ∗∗ Department of City and Regional Planning,
Yıldız Technical University, Faculty of Architecture, Besiktas, Istanbul, Turkey

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 strat-
egy-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 – domi-
nated 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

Correspondence Address: John Lovering, School of City and Regional Planning, Glamorgan Building, King
Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WA, UK. Email: LoveringJ@cardiff.ac.uk

ISSN 1356-3475 Print/1469-9265 Online/11/010001– 4 # 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13563475.2011.552471
2 J. Lovering & Y. Evren

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 sustain-
ability. 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 collec-
tion 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 exception-
ally centralized nature of the Turkish state (current measures to establish ‘regional devel-
opment 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 con-
spicuously-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’ ten-
dencies, 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 Plan-
ners, and others. These organizations play a major role in mediating or modifying planning
proposals originating with central government or private developers. Disputes over plan-
ning 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 devel-
opment 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 pro-
posals 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 disci-
plines 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 politi-
cal – 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 perspec-
tive 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
 Urban Development and Planning in Istanbul 3

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 disin-
tegrated 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 under-
gone 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 leg-
islative 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 regener-
ation 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.
4 J. Lovering & Y. Evren

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 distinc-
tive: 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 plan-
ning 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 competi-
tiveness’ 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.

References
Hatherley, O. (2010) Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (London: Verso Books).
Harvey, D. (2008) The right to the city, New Left Review, 53, pp. 23–40.