Page 135 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 2

Elçin Sarı - Sevim Pelin Öztürk - İmdat As

to become a pioneer in digitalization and to this end, plans are underway
to design the “NAR Innovation District”, a “LIVING CITY LAB” where new
1
technologies will be tested (Kurum, 2022). The city of the future, i.e., the
Esenler NAR Innovation District, offers a resilient and durable urban living
zone with its smart city applications, integrated spatial organization, flexible
spatial uses, smart grid infrastructure, circular waste management systems,
eco-friendly modes of transportation, strong-transparent and technology-
based governance network, and a structure ready to respond to disasters
such as earthquakes, floods, etc.
This study examines the practical contributions of Esenler Municipality to
resilient cities literature through the NAR Innovation District, as well as its
contribution to the urban transformation of Istanbul -- an urban area housing
the largest population in Europe. The potential natural and socio-economic
risks that threaten the global city of Istanbul and the district of Esenler will be
defined, and the potential vulnerabilities of the city will be determined; the
advantages of resilient, durable planning and design approaches to tackle
these problems will be compiled through a comprehensive literature review.
The NAR Innovation District provides a pool of solutions to these important
challenges, and this study will assess its capacity for resiliency.

1. Literature Review

A recent addition to the urban jargon, “resilience”, derives from the Latin
word, “Resi-lire”, and is defined as the capacity of materials to recover their
form after a shock they have been exposed to (Simmie and Martin, 2010).
Although first applied to the science of ecology by the ecologist Holling,
it was later defined as “engineering resilience” and ecological resilience”.
Engineering resilience refers to the equilibrium of the system after a shock;
ecological resilience, on the other hand, refers to a new state of equilibrium in
which the system recovers its functionality in other ways after a shock (Holling,
1973).
As the city is not just an ecological system, but also a social system, the
concept was later applied to social systems as “social resilience”. Rather
than the system’s transition to an equilibrium after a shock, social resilience

1 Kurum, M. (2022, 11 Şubat). Our ministry has been serving our citizens with the 189 applications
that have been moved to e-Devlet kapısı [Turkish e-government portal]. We have been working
hard to make Türkiye a pioneer of digitalization. We have designed “NAR INNOVATION ZONE”
as a “LIVING CITY AND URBANIZATION LAB” where new technologies will be tested. We have
prepared application reports in 108 different fields, from electric vehicle infrastructure to smart
transportation, innovative structure types to smart homes, underground waste collection to urban
agriculture [Tweet].https://twitter.com/murat_kurum/ status/1492115053033803780?s=24&t=-
0cxzr31DV7g4r8TU0suDXQ

121 Journal of Environment, Urbanization and Climate