Turkish Urban Research Articles

Navigating priorities: Assessing the challenges of curriculum reform in Turkish Urban and Regional Planning Schools

Planning departments in Türkiye recently witnessed a boom. In less than 20 years, the number of universities offering urban planning programs increased from a dozen to 45, most accepting students with limited resources. Urban planning education has faced many challenges over the last two decades, and offering education with limited resources carried this problem to another level, increasing concerns among scholars about the quality of the education and the learning outcomes a planner should possess at graduation. While planning schools in Türkiye deals with the issues above, global debates in planning education revolve around integrating topics such as climate change, inequality, informality, and decolonization into the curriculum. This study aimed to reveal to what extent global issues find their way into Turkish planning school agendas in an environment where more pressing matters threaten the quality of education. To look further into this issue, all documents published by TUPOB (Türkiye Planning Schools Association) since its foundation were analyzed, and seven in-depth interviews with TUPOB members were conducted. A predominantly qualitative approach was utilized. The findings suggest that the lack of resources is the most critical problem for urban planning schools, followed by insufficient teaching faculty. The curriculum updates and integration of global issues such as climate change and urban poverty come later in the priorities list. This research showed that concerns regarding resources and lack of standards take precedence over global discussions in planning curricula.

The urban fabric of Turkish cities

Urban development of Turkish cities has been strongly influenced by their fast-changing socioeconomic and political framework. In their turn, inherited morphological elements and their spatial organization influence today’s cities, their functioning, and their socioeconomic organization. This paper aims at identifying building and urban fabric types and at studying their spatial organization in Karşıyaka, Izmir, through MFA, an innovative computer-aided protocol. The outcomes are analyzed and interpreted regarding Turkish urban development history. The eight identified fabrics show a close correspondence to specific periods of Turkish urbanization. The model observed in Karşıyaka can be representative of many urban landscapes of Turkish metropolitan coastal regions. The paper contributes to the discussion and research on the identification of urbanization models for Turkish cities and their current development trends. Moreover, it represents a first step for future research on the relationship between urban morphology and environmental psychology, as well as urban planning and urban design guidelines.

School Leadership For Social Justice In Turkish Urban Setting

ABSTRACT Decades of research suggest that the role of leaders in mitigating the negative impact of social and economic problems on the students is highly contentious one and more analyses in different cultural contexts are necessary to clarify the role of leadership in disadvantaged school settings. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of leadership in resetting equitable and excellent educational experiences in two primary schools located in a socio-economically disadvantaged urban setting in Turkey. Multiple case study was identified as the design of the study, and two primary schools located in the same neighborhood were identified as the cases of the study. The results drawn from the multiple cases showed that leadership has a limited capacity to create socially just educational provisions and ensure excellence in schools’ academic practices. Parallel to the analyses in the sociology of education, sociological structures are more critical for the disadvantaged students in benefiting from educational provisions. As a result, leadership as an intervention mechanism must be empowered to set ties with other public services in disadvantaged schools.

The Impact of Parental Factors on Physical Aggression Perpetration among Turkish Urban Adolescents: The Mediating Role of Beliefs Supporting Aggression.

This study investigated parental factors and beliefs supporting aggression as predictors of physical aggression by adolescents. The participants were 2,443 junior high school students from Ankara, Turkey, who completed measures of parental support for aggression, family conflict, parental monitoring, beliefs supporting aggression, and physical aggression. The findings showed both direct and indirect effects of parental factors on physical aggression through beliefs supporting aggression. Furthermore, a multigroup model comparison indicated invariance of the structural relationships among variables in the model across gender and that the hypothesized structural model was a close fit for both the girl and the boy data. The findings suggest that it might be beneficial to consider beliefs supporting aggression and parental factors as risk factors when designing interventions to target physical aggression among adolescents.

Domestic wastewater treatment by real-scale electrocoagulation process.

In this study, domestic wastewaters originating from a settlement with a population of 17,500 were treated by electrocoagulation process in a real-scale EC plant and the economic applicability of the process was investigated. The removal efficiencies of control parameters in the influent and effluent of the real-scale treatment plant such as suspended solids (SS), biological oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP) and changes of pH and conductivity parameters were monitored for 12 months. The obtained data were evaluated according to European Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, Turkish Water Pollution Control Regulation and Turkish Urban Wastewater Treatment Regulation. According to the results obtained, the removal efficiencies of the pollutant parameters were achieved in the range of 72-83% for SS, 67-80% for COD, 69-81% for BOD, 21-47% for TN and 27-46% for TP. Considering the Turkish wastewater discharge regulations, it can be concluded that the discharge standards for SS, COD and BOD parameters were achieved while they were not achieved in certain periods for TN and TP. In addition, the energy consumption and the operating cost of this real-scale plant were determined to be 0.49-0.54 kWh/m3 and 0.24-0.28 EUR/m3, respectively.

The House as an Object of Naming in the Turkish Urban Onomasticon: Structural and Semantic Analysis

The article explores structural and semantic features of names of houses (oikodomonyms) in the Turkish language. The author proceeds from studying individual names’ motivations, contexts of their usage, and functional meaning (compared to the corresponding Russian designations) to the description of the general urbanonymic formula of Turkish house names. Typically, the name’s affiliation to this class is indicated by the element apartment (borrowed from French) which is used in modern Turkish to refer to the buildings intended for rental housing. In Turkish grammar, appellative nouns occur in postposition and agree with the complemented onym that specifies the nominated object. With names of houses, when these derive from other titles — a personal name or a sea name, the onymic component is formed through appellative onymization or transonomization and can consist of one or several elements with a variable degree of complexity. The study identifies typical patterns of house naming: “possessive” names, names verbalizing the concept of ‘home,’ reference names formed by metonymic transfer, “panegyric” names with double nomenclature element, communicative “greeting” names. The cultural and historical context of Turkish oikodomonymy reveals itself in less common yet present “memorial” names commemorating remarkable events. Another peculiar group is “associative” house names conditioned by the appearance of the building. There is a strong influence of extralinguistic factors in the urban onomasticon of Instanbul: the names of houses reflect cultural and historical traditions of the people, features of the city’s natural landscape, the multi-ethnic composition of the population of the metropolis. The large scope of this category of onyms, the variety of semantic patterns and the functions it displays, as well as extensive, continuously replenished vocabulary, brings Turkish house names into a separate and well-established microsystem within the Turkish urban toponymicon.

Neighborhood from Cul-De-Sac to Gated Community in Turkish Urban Culture: The "Fina"

In this study, the closed neighborhood was discussed in gated communities and in cul-de-sacs by focusing on public and private concepts, rights and regulations in Turkish urban culture. The study aims to enlighten old concepts such as “close neighborhood,” “gated community,” and “cul-de-sac” with a new approach in order to understand whether planned and modern gated communities contain the same aspects of traditional Turkish cul-de-sacs – part of the “fina” concept. According to tradition and culture, the concept of fina is a kind of usage of public space as if it were private. In the modern age, gated communities have created new life styles, spaces and boundaries with their advantages and disadvantages all over the world. The gated community may be called an “architecture of fear,” namely fear of the neighbors, fear of theft, fear of the one living outside the gates. On the other hand, cul-de-sacs are derived from friendships and family relations – namely, being friend s with relatives, neighbors and nature. Gated communities and cul-de-sacs are both created by making public space – belonging to all citizens – into private/semi-private space belonging to only a special community. A comparative method is used between gated communities and cul-de-sacs in order to understand whether the legalization of using public space in private ways creates benefits to society as a whole or not. The result expected from this study is not only to determine the similarities and differences pertaining to cul-de-sacs and gated communities but also to reveal the positive values generated or existing in these two living areas and provide feedback with the potential of reflecting each other.

Between knowledge of landscape production and representation

Between knowledge of landscape production and representation

The Image of Urban Politics: Turkish Urban Professionals and Urban Representation as a Site of Struggle

This article analyzes the politics of visual representations of the city in the postwar Turkish context. In this period, marked by rapid urbanization, urban problems entered into the realm of daily politics and the city turned into a terrain of struggle. A major component of this struggle was the representations of the city. Particular interest is given to the role played by Turkish architects and urban planners in producing visual representations of the city that became components of a counterhegemonic urban politics during the 1960s and 1970s.

Organic Intellectuals of Urban Politics? Turkish Urban Professionals as Political Agents, 1960—80

The post-war period in Turkey witnessed a rapid phase of urbanisation that widely shaped the social and political environment during the 1960s and the 1970s. In this period, which was marked by the extensive politicisation of the urban masses, urban problems entered into the realm of daily politics and urban politics evolved into an autonomous realm of struggle. This article analyses the role played by Turkish architects and urban planners, who will homogeneously be labelled as urban professionals, within this process. The intention is to scrutinise the counter-hegemonic potentials of a political agency on the part of urban professionals with reference to the Gramscian concept of `organic intellectuals'.

Urban wastewater treatment plants and reuse potential in Turkey: selected examples from the western cities

The present study refers to the outcomes of a detailed survey on the current situation of Turkish Urban Wastewater Treatment Plants (UWWTPs). The survey covers the identification of the population served by UWWTPs, presentation of the current technologies (physical, biological and advanced) applied in the country's UWWTPs, prevailing effluent disposal criteria, detailed assessment of UWWTPs selected from the Western part of Turkey representing highly urbanised and industrialised districts, and elucidation of needs for upgrading the selected UWWTPs to comply with the current discharge standards and irrigation water quality criteria. Following an extensive data collection and evaluation step, Turkey's most recent situation in the number of UWWTPs, effluent produced in Turkish municipalities both quantity-and quality-wise, urban wastewater treatment types and disposal methods as well as reuse potential of treated urban wastewater have been presented and discussed.

Characterization of the Street Networks in the Traditional Turkish Urban Form

In this paper, we use the question “what is the true nature of traditional street networks in Turkish cities?” to test different quantitative methods of urban morphological analysis. Traditional Turkish street networks are characterized by discriminant functions of several space-syntax-related indices, as well as by image-analysis and graph-theoretical indices. A set of space-syntactic indices is found to be powerful enough to distinguish the traditional street network among others, particularly axial ringiness, implying that the formation of large blocks is a typical feature. The relative abundance of closed-end edges is found to be another important feature of the traditional street network.

Continuity and Change in Turkish Urban Family Life

This study investigates continuity and change in child-rearing attitudes and intrafamily status of the woman in urban middle class Türkiye. A group of 75 women responded to questions about values attributed to children, preference for children's sex, and woman's status in relation to the husband. Findings indicate a decrease in the economic value and an increase in the psychological value of children, together with a decrease in boy preference and an increase in girl preference. Contrary to previous research, old age security is more often mentioned as a reason for preferring girls than for preferring boys. Compared to the past, women are more involved in decision-making in urban families. Equalitarian intrafamily relations, with increased shared decision- making, communication, and role sharing between spouses, are associated with lower levels of fertility.

Turkish Urban Popular Music

Turkish Urban Popular Music