Housing Policies and Urban Renewal Projects in Turkey Performance Criteria for Urban RenewalProject

It has been observed that Turkish policy makers have experimented and applied a wide spectrum of housing policies since the foundation of the Republic. With the turn of the Century, a sharp change in the housing policies started to take place, thanks to the relatively stable macro-economic conditions in Turkey. In this context, it appears that urban renewal is turning into one of the significant models to raise new dwellings particularly in the central areas as well as the peripheries of the major cities. In the past decade, it appeared that urban renewal projects were subject to numerous criticisms by means of public benefit, financial modeling (like PPP) and social concerns. In this paper, in a broader perspective, the authors question whether housing provision arising from the urban renewal projects is adequate to meet housing needs of the lower income groups and the urban poor. The authors also argue that although urban renewal projects play a pivotal role in the transformation of the squatter settlements in the major cities of Turkey, there are vibrant oppositions against the current renewal practices. Therefore, to determine pros and cons of the urban renewal schemes in Turkey, this paper specifically focuses on the Do?anbey/Bursa Urban Renewal Project - a 3,000-unit project right in the downtown Bursa, besides a brief of other selected projects. It also assesses, specifically in the case of Turkish experience, the financial, political, legal, technical, environmental and socio-economic dimensions of urban renewal projects as a whole. This paper contributes in two different aspects. Firstly, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyze Do?anbey/Bursa Urban Renewal Project particularly in the context of suggested urban renewal performance criteria along with the regional housing policies. Secondly, taking into account both the existing urban renewal literature and the leading housing renewal cases in Turkey, with Do?anbey project, we propose a performance criteria (rating methodology) to evaluate how doable a prospective urban renewal project might be. The suggested model will help perform a cost-benefit analysis and hence rate a specific renewal project based on categorical classification of its defined features. We believe that this value added methodology will help both policy makers and market players to analyze social and economic feasibility of the potential urban renewal projects before actually starting them up.