Page 189 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 4

Hilmi Tutar

1. Introduction

The unplanned and unhealthy growth of cities caught unprepared for
migration in Türkiye has revealed structures that are unresistant to disasters
that can be described as slums in the historical process of housing. These
structures have become unstable in a time of disaster, causing thousands of
citizens living in them to lose their safety of life and property, and unhealthy
development of cities.
These slums, which emerged as a result of the inability to produce adequate
housing and were almost turned into a model or overlooked, have turned
out to be a building stock that is unhealthy, risky against disasters, physically
outdated and completed their lifetime over time, which has become one of
the most important problems of our country and cities.
The construction of slums having the purpose of solely acquiring a house
in the early years went beyond this housing purpose in the following years
and became an income-generating property, and half of the slums started to
be rented in the 1990s. Therefore the slum problem has gone beyond wrong
1
urbanisation and became a sociological problem (Çakır, 2011:221). By the
1995s, the number of slums had reached about 2 million and the population
living in slums had amounted to 10 million.
Until the 1950s, production of housing was perceived only as lodging for
public personnel, while after the 1960s, houses were started to be built by
the citizens’ own means and competencies, or by the activities of private
enterprises. Until the 2000s, 40-45% of total housing stock in Türkiye was made
up by Property Developers, while 10% was constituted by cooperative housing
societies and 40-45% by slums (Şenyapılı, 1996:345). The expansion of the
cooperative housing societies and Property Developers has also changed the
population growth, the number and nature of apartment buildings in cities.
The urban population ratio, which was 16.28% in 1927, increased to 25.5%
in 1950, 44% in 1980, 65% in 2000, 77% in 2012, and when the proportion of
residents in provincial and district centers was calculated, this ratio reached
to 92,1% in 2015, 92,3% in 2016 and 93,2% in 2021. In parallel, the proportion
2
of residents living in towns and villages has decreased to 6.8%. In addition,
since a sustainable incentive mechanism could not be introduced to housing
projects, number of poor-quality and unhealthy structures have also increased.

1 This rate was 49.23% in Ankara, 57.34% in İstanbul, 43.81% in Izmir.
2 With the “Law no. 6360 on the Establishment of a Metropolitan Municipality in Thirteen Prov-
inces and Twenty-Six Districts and Amendments to Some Laws and Decree Laws”, the status of
villages has changed into neighborhoods and the village population ratio has decreased accord-
ing to official statistics. Taking into account the latest province-town/village ratios before the law
No. 6360, it can be said that 22.7% of the population, i.e. about 17 million people, lived in towns
and villages in 2012.

178 The Journal of Environment, Urban and Climate