Speaker
Description
Introduction
Northern Istanbul represents a distinct post-extractive landscape spanning approximately 70 km², stretching from Lake Terkos in the west to Çiftalan village in the east. Beginning in the 1910s with open-pit coal mining in Ağaçlı village, the region underwent continuous cycles of resource extraction, including lignite, clay, sand dredging and stone quarrying. These operations terraformed the topography and disrupted original river networks. However, as open-pit mines were depleted and abandoned, they flooded with groundwater aquifers and precipitation, giving rise to an expanding post-industrial wetland landscape east of Lake Terkos. Within this newly emerged environment, a unique socio-ecological system developed through an alliance between Anatolian water buffalo and local herding communities, who are predominantly descendants of Balkan and Greek migrants from the 1923 Population Exchange.
Today, approximately 41 herders across 8 villages in Arnavutköy and Eyüpsultan municipalities manage around 3,900 water buffalo. The buffalo act as keystone species whose movements and wallowing physically maintain water channels and create habitats for migratory birds and aquatic fauna. Nevertheless, since 2013, this fragile ecosystem has been subjected to hyper-scale metropolitan infrastructure projects, most notably Istanbul Airport, the Northern Marmara Highway and the masterplan for the Kanal Istanbul shipping canal. These projects rezone rural land to urban, drain wetlands and fragment the grazing commons.
In the absence of adequate formal legal protection for these post-industrial wetlands, local socio-ecological knowledge and everyday land-management practices become increasingly vulnerable to displacement and erasure. Against this backdrop, the research asks: How do competing transition pathways reshape post-industrial socio-ecological landscapes, and how can planning identify and activate leverage points under conditions of infrastructural rupture and institutional uncertainty?
Conceptual framework
To analyze the spatial processes in northern Istanbul, this paper builds on a theoretical distinction between transition and transformation, conceptualizing transition as a gradual reconfiguration of socio-ecological relations and landscape and transformation as a more fundamental change in the structures, functions and spatial relations through which the system is reproduced. The framework introduces four focused concepts:
1/ Rupture: Hyper-scale infrastructural and socio-legal interventions that abruptly interrupt established co-adaptive human-environment processes.
2/ Transition pathways: Competing developmental trajectories originating from divergent visions of space (technocratic-extractive vs. socio-ecological pathways).
3/ Competing knowledges: The conflict between the dominant, engineering-focused epistemology of state planners and the experiential, generational knowledge of herders who laboriously inhabit the landscape.
4/ Commons: Collective resource systems (grazing pastures, water channels, wallows) managed outside purely private or state-owned frameworks. Tactical planning is understood here not as an alternative to strategic planning, but as the selective activation of epistemic, spatial and institutional leverage points within a transition process that planners cannot comprehensively control.
Methods
This study draws on a multi-method methodology conducted between 2019 and 2023. The spatial scope covers approximately 70 km² along the northern coast from Lake Terkos to Çiftalan, encompassing 8 villages across Arnavutköy (Yeniköy, Baklalı, Tayakadın) and Eyüpsultan (Akpınar, Ağaçlı, Çiftalan, Odayeri, Işıklar) municipalities.
The methodology integrates:
a/ Cartographic and historical analysis: Examination of archival maps from 1915 and 1917 (Salt Archives, Erkan-ı Harbiye collections), a 1970 aerial view of northern Istanbul and historical records from Kutman Mining.
b/ Spatial analysis: Mapping of megaproject boundaries (airport enclosure, Kanal Istanbul masterplan), drainage basins, remaining active and seasonal pastures and herding infrastructure.
c/ Participatory mapping and fieldwork: Conducting the "Manda Sohbetleri" (Buffalo Talks) mapping workshop on September 16th 2023, alongside 18 qualitative interviews with 12 herders between May and September 2023 and analyzing municipal strategic policy documents such as İstanbul Gıda Strateji Belgesi.
Results
An emergent socio-ecological transition
Intensive coal, clay and sand mining throughout the 20th century initially functioned as a destructive force, draining original streams and lowering water tables. However, as open-pit mines were depleted and abandoned, the deep and shallow pits filled with water from rainfall and surfacing aquifers, creating an expanding post-industrial wetland habitat. Pastoralist communities (whose ancestors brought herding techniques from the Balkans) integrated into this modified landscape. An emergent socio-ecological system developed wherein water buffalo act as keystone species: as they submerge in mud to regulate their body temperature, their movements carve channels connecting isolated pools, enabling movement for fish and frogs while providing feeding grounds for migratory birds. Simultaneously, herders established seasonal grazing practices across communal pastures and harvested agricultural fields, building a local economy with a daily milk yield of approximately 7,000 to 8,000 liters across the 8 villages.
Rupture and competing transition pathways
Since 2013, this evolutionary co-adaptation has experienced a severe rupture caused by hyper-scale infrastructure construction, including Istanbul Airport, highway networks and the proposed Kanal Istanbul. These interventions have caused severe spatial fragmentation and pasture loss: for example, in Tayakadın, all former pastures were enclosed within the airport boundary, forcing herders to keep buffalo inside barns with artificial sprinkler systems. At the core of this rupture lies a clash of competing knowledges: a technocratic epistemology embraced by state and private developers frames these wetlands as "degraded" or "idle" land suitable for urban rezoning, exploiting the fact that post-industrial wetlands lack formal legal recognition as "natural" protected sites. Conversely, the local herding epistemology understands these spaces as vital grazing commons. Pasture loss has forced herders into a high dependency on expensive imported fodder, which, combined with fixed and inadequate state subsidies (1,500 kg of fodder annually per registered herder with 5+ buffalo regardless of total herd size), severely threatens economic viability and drives youth out-migration. The conflict is therefore not simply epistemic but institutional: while technocratic knowledge is translated into statutory plans, infrastructure boundaries and investment decisions, herders' situated knowledge remains largely absent from the formal instruments through which spatial futures are decided.
Planning through tactical leverage points
In response to these existential pressures, the research identifies three key tactical leverage points:
1/ Participatory mapping (Manda Sohbetleri): The September 2023 mapping workshop enabled herders to transfer their experiential knowledge of seasonal grazing routes, wallows and communal pastures onto physical maps, making invisible commons spatially legible and defendable.
2/ Herder's collective facilities: In Ağaçlı village, where keeping barns inside the residential core created spatial conflicts, herders articulated a plan to lease municipal land rich in reeds and clover outside the village. They proposed constructing a collective facility with communal pastures, barns and milking infrastructure, offering a spatial and hygienic compromise.
3/ Protection via alternative legal categories and urban food networks: Lacking formal wetland protection status, Ağaçlı residents successfully secured legal protection for coastal sand dunes by leveraging regulations protecting endangered endemic species, specifically sea daffodils. Simultaneously, in central Istanbul, Çamuralem Muhallebicisi was opened in Kurtuluş as a direct sales outlet for water buffalo milk products and an exhibition space. This initiative connects metropolitan consumers directly to peripheral wetlands, establishing a socio-economic leverage point that aligns with the goals of Istanbul's Food Strategy.
Discussion and conclusion
The case demonstrates that transformation is not necessarily the evolutionary outcome of an existing transition. Rather, infrastructural rupture can interrupt one transition pathway while enabling another, redistributing spatial resources, institutional recognition and implementation capacity between competing trajectories of change. In northern Istanbul, two distinct transition pathways (a top-down technocratic-extractive pathway and a bottom-up socio-ecological pathway) simultaneously compete for physical space, institutional recognition and legitimacy.
Under these conditions, spatial planning cannot remain a passive instrument of technical rezoning or top-down infrastructure implementation. Instead, planning can act as a transformative practice by identifying tactical leverage points, ranging from participatory cartography and alternative ecological legal categories (endemic species protection) to building short urban-rural food networks. By translating local socio-ecological knowledge into spatial and institutional action, post-industrial wetlands can be recognized and safeguarded as vital grazing commons and productive food landscapes essential to urban resilience in an era of climate crisis.
References
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