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natural and man-made disasters such as storms, floods, fires and droughts. This
situation has now gone beyond a necessity. For this reason, we evaluate broadly
the issues that are of particular concern for all humanity and us, and take into
account the requirements of the era and the urbanisation problems of the future.
We prepare our cities for the current era of crisis, the century of disasters in the
most proper way. We act with the awareness that Anatolia is a seismically-prone
region, as well as its unique geography and rich nature. Disasters related to
the climate crisis, especially earthquakes, are the focus of our preparations. We
show great efforts to make our cities and villages resilient at both spatial and
social levels against the earthquakes that Türkiye has experienced in the last 100
years, the floods that it has faced in the last 5 years, forest fires and the Covid-19
Pandemic that has paralyzed everyday life all over the world. In this regard, we
develop policies and models that address risk and crisis management processes
at every stage from a holistic point of view.
Disasters, earthquakes in particular, are the catastrophes that we encounter
frequently as a country, leading to great loss of lives. These disasters cause
substantial damage to our settlements, especially our cities, and leave deep
traces in our social memory. The 1939 Erzincan Earthquake, the 1999 Marmara
Earthquake, the Duzce, Van, Bingol, Muş, Elazığ-Malatya, Izmir and the February
6 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes are disasters that have been recorded in our
history with sorrow. However, the negative impacts of disasters are affecting
our cities more and more every day, and this situation necessitates to change
all approaches and methods from architecture to urbanisation, agriculture
and food to education, production to finance, transportation and logistics to
environmental policies and to adapt to new conditions in all of our 81 cities.
Following the 1999 Marmara Earthquake, which is considered a milestone
for Türkiye, and after the year 2002, there have been major changes in the
approach to urbanisation. Making the cities resilient has been a priority field
of work in each area. Significant legal regulations have been implemented,
at first, to conduct these studies properly, and new applications have been
introduced in this regard. These applications include drawing up the earthquake
regulation, establishing and widespreading the building inspection system,
the introduction of compulsory earthquake insurance, expediting the housing
construction works by municipalities and TOKİ, enforcement of Law on Urban
Transformation after the Van Earthquake on 2011.
On-site, voluntary and fast urban transformation movement, which has been
initiated by our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2011 with the goal of “On-
Site Urban Transformation Everywhere in Türkiye” is one of our vision projects
in terms of its effect on increasing urban resilience among these applications.
Within the scope of our urban transformation projects, transformation of 2

VIII The Journal of Environment, Urban and Climate