Speaker
Description
Designing and planning the retreat of urban areas where needed is an alien concept for the urban planning and design realm. Spatialization of degrowth within post-growth urbanism context is also a relatively new pursuit. The built environment of cities once produced as solutions to specific problems within a specific climate is now facing problems as the results of previous eras’ solutions and the unpredictability and uncertainty brought by the new realities of the climate crisis. Within this climate, nature and the city nexus, to explore the spatial possibilities of degrowth in the existing urban fabric and to compare the costs of keeping the problematic urban spatial solutions as they are versus adapting with nature based urban spatial solutions, the buried rivers of Ankara have been selected as the vessel.
For this study, aiming to examine the costs and benefits of the built environment of the urban fabric alienated from nature and the prices we pay for keeping the urban fabric as it is, Ankara—a city where rivers were buried and transformed into developed urban land as a solution to development problems throughout its history, is a unique research context. Today, Ankara faces serious challenges due to the invisible water flow through and within the urban fabric including both infrastructures and superstructures, and the unpredictable behavior of these buried rivers, exacerbated by the climate crisis.
The tension between nature and the city, in the form of the buried urban rivers, is usually handled with two distinct and even opposing views regarding the juxtaposition of natural water systems and urban areas. The first one prioritizes the ecosystem and focuses on peripheral or open rivers while the second one adopts a purely urban approach, focusing on the role of natural areas within urban design and planning, viewing them as public elements with a function within the urban system. The only way to move forward in a healthy integration of the natural areas in the urban space is to reconcile these two within the context of the degrowth spatialization efforts.
Within the scope of this study, with a historical-geomorphological perspective, Ankara’s urban fabric and its relationship with water are analyzed. Furthermore, the ongoing problems caused by the burial of rivers are spatially analyzed in order to discuss the spatial possibilities of degrowth and new planning and urban design policies for the medium and the long-term. The findings of this study ultimately reveal that the cost of maintaining urban space as it far exceeds the benefits of prioritizing nature and making rivers visible again through a new, nature based degrowth approach.
| Keywords | Degrowth; Post-growth Urbanism; Nature-based Urbanism; Spatial Policy; Water Policy |
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