Introduction

Housing in Turkey has long been seen as a problem of quantity. From the 1920s, through the establishment of new urban centres as symbols of the modern Republic established in 1923, the provision of new housing has played a central role in housing policies as a response to continuous and rapid population growth through natural increase and rural–urban migration. Different formal modes of production have been developed to house citizens in accordance with the law, while until the 2000s, the housing deficit continued to be closed by the citizens themselves through the building of informal squatter settlements (gecekondu, literally ‘built overnight’). Attitudes towards these settlements have been reflected in the legalisation and other concessions granted between 1949 and 1983: residents were seen as an economic resource in a then developing country of limited resources. This attitude has provided a continued impetus for further informal settlements, mainly for people moving from rural to urban areas of Turkey, especially but not exclusively to the large cities such as Istanbul. Inevitably, the earliest concerns about housing quality related to the squatter neighbourhoods and prepared the way for the upgrading policies and programmes which have been followed since the 1960s. Although the transformation of these neighbourhoods through the upgrading of their infrastructure improved the residents’ quality of life, it has been argued that the acceptance of these informal settlements, in view of ever rising rents in the formal sector of the urban housing market, has negatively affected the moral codes of society, so that informal arrangements, blurring the boundaries between formal and informal, have also become common in the formal housing sector (Ozuekren, 1998).

The quality of formal housing was not questioned until the end of the 1990s. The meetings to prepare the National Report for Habitat II, the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements held in Istanbul in 1996, marked a significant change in the perception of housing issues in Turkey, however, emphasising the growing need for renewal in both formal and informal housing. The need for the consolidation of existing housing structures was also stressed as an important issue for disaster preparedness.