Use of public spaces in private space-led urbanization: The cases of Kadıköy and Ataşehir in İstanbul

Abstract

Public spaces have been in interrogation in last decades. The focus of the dis-cussions is privatization of public spaces, regarding the way of urbanization. The approaches to the publicness of public spaces developed via diverse consider-ations such as the ambiguous meanings of the concepts of public and private, the role of public institutions, and control on public spaces. These approaches basi-cally depend on the experiences of advanced capitalist societies. In this research, the aim is to understand the basic characteristics of public spaces in terms of user profiles and user habits in Istanbul in two distinctive districts in Asian side. The public space literature on İstanbul suffers from the lack of the research depending on field survey. Hence, one of the areas is Kadıköy which is located in central part, and urbanized in a conventional fashion. The other one is West Ataşehir developed in the last decade, and built up as a constellation of gated communities, which is called private space-led urbanization in this research. Also, West Ataşe-hir is announced as a new CBD, the so called "Finance Centre of Istanbul". The findings of field research are interesting in terms of similar profiles of users, and quite different with regard to user habits in both cases. The article has for main parts, introduction clarifies the problem, the second part summarizes the debates on public space and publicness, the third part shows the results of the field re-search, and the last part includes results and conclusions.