Istanbul; The Planning of Residential and Industrial Areas in the Process of Transformation into a Sustainable City

Abstract

This research puts forward İstanbul’s problematics as one of the largest Metropolitan in the world and the process of paradoxically the transformation from a historical city to a sustainable city. The aim of this study presents an updated dialogue about Istanbul’s problems today which was changed to the mass agglomeration by the overpopulation and the examination of determination of “residential areas” and “industrial areas” in the context of sustainability. Even though recent public popularity of sustainability that initiated in the last quarter of the twentieth century but awareness of the people of Istanbul would take long years. Industrial zones that developed on the outskirts of the city for many years interwoven with slum areas, (gecekondu) where the worker’s factories lived right next to it, and densely formed a wide hinterland that defined the borders of Istanbul today. Furthermore, Istanbul had to deal with inner problems in years such as natural hazards, earthquakes, and migrations which was triggered the housing problem. Even though many research on Istanbul city it was observed that the previous research did not involve the issue of sustainability in the context of “industrial areas” and “housing” was examined as separated matters lacked the integrative link within recent problematics and consequences. Recently in the new and innovative design, the discursive, and practical contexts in the climate change, some old urban planning techniques were came-back in urban planning dialectic as the new research object. These old discursive ideas and old zones (zoning) method based on separating “industrial”, “residential”, and “green” areas since the beginning of the twentieth century became major criteria again in the research for future planning of the cities. Establishing an updated historical connection between French architect-planner Henri Prost’s Paris and Istanbul Master plans and his previous zoning planning principles which were used in these plans to determine “residential” and “industrial” and “green areas” was examined. Istanbul city re-examined in this study within a new perspective with a method based on multiple morphological and epistemological identifications also included old planning techniques and innovative methods. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.