Speaker
Description
"Urban densification" is a current and controversial concept in the urban planning literature. Some studies in the literature present urban densification as an argument against the urban policies that support urban sprawl as an effective use of resources. Although urban densification may consider to provide several social, economic and environmental benefits in this sense, urban densification creates the specific challenges, impacts and fragilities in many cities. The effect of urban densification may vary in different planning systems. For example, while planning decisions taken in the context of densification policies, which are articulated with partial interventions in the urban space, could not cause problems in project-based systems, which have inherent flexibility, they may cause some problems in plan-based systems, where certainty and legal binding are strong. The aim of this article is to discuss plan changes, which are one of the partial tools used to intervene in the plan-based system, in the context of densification, and to examine their impact on the İstanbul metropolitan area. The study area was the metropolitan area of Istanbul. There are many reasons why Turkey, and especially Istanbul, was chosen as the study area to examine the spatial relationship between plan changes and urban densification. The most important of these is that neoliberal policies have played a significant role in the dynamic development of cities in Turkey since the 1980s. Moreover, Istanbul is the city where neoliberal economic policies are most prevalent. In addition, in Istanbul, many planning changes are made by the municipality and the central government in response to market conditions. Within the scope of the study, plan changes approved by the Metropolitan Municipality Council affiliated to the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality between the years 2014-2023 (last decade), and plan changes approved by the central government and used as a direct tool to densify were discussed. In the study, among these changes, the study focused on those directly related to urban densification. It also analysed the spatial impact of these changes and discussed their spatial implications. The first findings of the study show that densification policies have spread throughout the urban space and that this spread does not contain any control mechanism in the context of process and space. In the literature, although studies on plan changes carried out as a result of neo-liberal pressures mostly focus on the spatial behaviour of plan changes, their impacts on spatial, value capture and planning policies, studies addressing plan changes in the context of densification are quite limited. On the other hand, there is a significant gap in the understanding of the relationship between urban densification and plan changes, particularly in metropolitan areas. For developing countries where investment pressures are high, and for countries with a plan-based system where partial interventions are common, this study is likely to make a contribution.
References
Teller, J. (2021). Regulating urban densification: what factors should be used? Buildings & Cities, 2 (1), p. 302–317. 10.5334/bc.123
Dembski, S., Hartman, T., Hengstermann, A. & Dunning, R. (2020). Enhancing understanding of strategies of land policy for urban densification, Town Planning Review 91 (3). https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2020.12
Kjærås, K. (2023). The politics of urban densification in Oslo, Urban Studies, 61 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098023117819
Gerber, J. D. & Debrunner, G. (2022). Planning with power. Implementing urban densification policies in Zurich, Switzerland, Land Use Policy, Vol. 123, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2022.106400
| Keywords | Urban densification, plan change, plan-based systems, Istanbul, Turkey. |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
