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Resilient Cities From Geodesign Perspective:
The Case of Şanlıurfa Province

in the country’s records as the most tragic cases that take its place in the
country’s disaster archive. If we are to mention a few of the most recent
ones; it would be sufficient to touch upon major painful events such as the
earthquake of the century, which occured on February 06, 2023 in 11 provinces
causing more than fifty thousand causalities and about two hundred thousand
houses destroyed, Van-Elazığ-İzmir earthquakes, 1999 Marmara earthquake.
Another question raised by all these sorrowful events is whether these events
are really natural disasters. Because disasters experienced in different regions
and types opens the way for a common result. According to this fact, it was
observed that death and destruction do not actually occur as a result of natural
disasters, but mainly occur as a result of unplanned, incorrect and incomplete
practices caused by humans. The expression “an earthquake does not kill, the
building kills” uttered by experts has become a slogan accepted by the public
and has adopted a common discourse summarizing the situation.
The assessments made in the light of all these facts have made the need
for urban planning even more important, and become an absolute must for
countries such as Türkiye that are prone to disasters above normal. Human-
oriented urban infrastructure activities carried out by taking these facts into
account will be able to create resilient and healthy solutions thus the negative
consequences of repeated disasters will be prevented. In this direction, long-
form reports and two-dimensional maps were used in traditional studies on
urban planning, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have started to
be used since the 90s which have become a standard. (Yeh, 1999). Moreover,
it was also questioned to which extent GIS has been successful in solving
urban and spatial planning problems in the past. GIS has become an integral
part of planning in many countries of the world for decades (Harris et al.,
1993; Klostermann, 1997; Yeh, 2008), and the considerations regarding that its
traditional use is not limited have also been accepted. On the other hand, GIS
has been used to describe the past and present state of the environment, but
has been insufficient in visualizing and analyzing plans for the future. It was also
observed that decision-making stakeholders lack the ability to integrate the
cooperation. GIS outputs in the form of printed maps are still used as the only
official tool in public sessions in many cities as part of long-form reports (Healey,
1997; Halvorsen, 2001; Innes & Booher, 2004; Kingston, 2007). In addition to the
widespread use of GIS in academic institutions, local governments and almost
all commercial sectors worldwide, availability of first GIS applications on the
Internet paved the way for wider audience participation. In 1996, at the meeting
of The National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) of
the United States, the phrase “public participation geographic information
system” (PPGIS) was mentioned for the first time. With this phrase, a definition
was provided on how GIS can facilitate public participation for various cases

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