The effects of improvement plans on urban transformation process in illegal built up/squatter areas in Turkey: İzmir and Ankara cases

Abstract

Today, urbanization problems which have been experienced in the past fifty years in our country have also brought about other deep-rooted problems in other sectors. The migration which started in the 1950s is the major cause of all urban problems. The social and economic problems that arose after migration, later manifested themselves in the physical space; and after the emergence of the first squatter houses a process that later turned into a practice of continuous illegal building construction was to begin. Urban problems have turned into an impasse due to the uncontrolled development and cities spreading hastily towards their peripheries, the changing social structure of cities after migratory waves, continuously mounting spatial problems, lack of policies, an even policies promoting these developments. However, it is stressed by the State Statistics Institute that the speed of population increase will go down significantly in next decades. The decrease in population rate and the focusing of government policies on the transformation of squatter areas give hints for the fact that urban transformation will always be on the agenda in the following years.In this sense, within the scope of this thesis study, especially the transformation processes which formed in the squatter/illegally constructed areas of the post 1980s in Turkey were investigated in detail. In order to present an objective picture of the transformation processes in those areas, two different samples which experienced the same transformation process in the post 1980 period were selected because different transformation processes emerged in different squatter areas where the same improvement plan was applied. Along with this, as two different work areas, the improvement plans which were applied in the squatter/illegally constructed areas in Ankara-Çankaya and Izmir-Konak municipalities were investigated, and the transformation processes were analyzed and the two different processes were reflected. At the basis of this study lies the need for investigating the urban transformation processes in squatter and illegally constructed areas, which seems especially to be a problem of big towns and metropolitan cities, and also the thought of identifying the problem objectively. This study aims at identifying urban renewal form and how the transformation process has developed, and under what sort of conditions within the present settlement of the Turkish cities, in other words in squatter or illegallyconstructed areas in recent years. In this study, in order to find out under what conditions and in which organizational structure market-based urban transformation processes were realized by individuals and in the leadership of constructors, the squatter/illegally constructed areas in Ankara-Çankaya and İzmir-Konak municipalities, where improvement plans were applied, were comparatively investigated. Key Words: Urban Transformation Processes, Squatter Areas, Improvement Plans, Redevelopment, Holistic Planning, Partnerships, Participations.