The regressive planning practice of private sector planners under the pressure of political and market forces in Turkey

Abstract

Private-sector planners in Turkey have been operating in a planning system that has been restructured within the framework of neoliberal urban policies for the last forty years. Especially after 2000, while the model of growth over construction was adopted as a basic economic policy, the planning practices that implemented these policies were seen as a means of capital accumulation by wider social groups. In this economic political environment, private-sector planners have entered into new relationships with politics, markets, and bureaucracy, and have settled in the centre of criticism with professional practices that fall behind the basic principles of the profession, such as land speculation and serving certain pressure groups instead of the public interest. This article focuses on the conditions in which private-sector planners realize their planning practices and the problems they encounter in their plan-making processes. According to private-sector planners, the most important problem is the increase in the determination of rent-oriented interest relations between public institutions and local market actors instead of public benefit in the planning process. Private-sector planners believe that at every stage of the planning process, politicians and market actors exert pressure on planners, and that these forces have caused Turkey's planning practices to decline.