Transformation process of a risky building according to the law no. 6306 and problems encountered : The case of a district municipality

Due to the geography in which our country is located, many regions have a natural disaster risk. Between those disaster types, for our country, the earthquakes are in the foreground as an indisputable fact in terms of damages caused by earthquakes up to now and the structures designed without considering earthquake effects present a great risk. It is estimated that buildings designed insufficiently for earthquake forces and illegal structures with poor material strength and without engineering services constitute about 40% of the total building stock of our country and accordingly 7 million of them should be renewed or strengthened. In order to speed up that transformation process required for our country, The Law About the Transformation of Areas Under Disaster Risk No.6306 (also known as the Urban Transformation Law) published in 2012. Although it is stated that this law has been prepared to build healthy and safe living spaces ; the law includes many points that can be criticized. The most important of these is the recognition of broad authority to central administration. Besides, the law is criticized for bringing some restrictions on the right of ownership. According to the law, a building may be demolished if it is at the area declared risky, and if it is outside the risky area, it can be determined as risky after one of the owner's demand for inspection. With the outbreak of the law, the demolition of old buildings has increased in number. As a result of the increase in the number of demolitions, one of the issues that has come to the agenda in recent days in terms of environment and human health is the risk of damage caused by asbestos-containing materials located in old buildings. While the related regulations specify provisions for the determination of asbestos-containing material during the demolition process and removal of them by specialists, it is seen that these provisions have not been implemented by the relevant administrations or the applications have been lacking and inadequate. On the other hand, the process of getting a building's permit to construct has several stages. Although the stages of this process differs according to the administrations, the basic steps are defined in laws and regulations. The properties of a building such as height, floor area, building coverage, flat plans etc. are determined by the architectural plans drawn according to the current development plans, building codes, laws and regulations. Ground survey report, static, electrical and mechanical drawings and calculation reports are the complementary elements of architectural drawings and if necessary architectural drawings can be revised according to them. Beside these drawings and reports, some technical and non-technical documents regarding occupational safety, construction supervision, construction supervisor, contractor firm are required to get building permit. The process of getting building permit is one of the factors affecting the duration of the project. An investor company, by being conscious of the rights and losses that the Law No.6306 provides and being aware of building permit process and its requirements, can shorten the project duration or prevent project delays. Within the context of this work; declaration of a building as a risky structure, demolition and reconstruction of it in accordance with Law No. 6306 is stated by being supported process flow diagrams. This process implemented at Istanbul Municipality Maltepe District is shown as an instance. Also, the problems encountered during the transformation process caused by the implementation are explained by some case studies. With this study, it is aimed to determine and rank the applications made according to the legislation from the identification phase of the risky structures until the stage of taking the reconstruction permit within the scope of Law No. 6306 and thus to systematically state the phases constituting this transformation process. In addition, the implementation of the relevant legislation on the process dealt with at Maltepe Distict Municipality and the detection of the problems is the other objective of this study. In the process of drafting the thesis, firstly the literature is searched about the selected subject and the thesis contents is decided by examining similar studies related to the determined targets and scope. In order to introduce the basic terms related to the transformation process, first the terms of building, zoning plans and building permit are mentioned and information about types of building permit is given. In the light of this basic information, the process of acquiring the building permit is described gradually with flow charts. The operation process of Law No. 6306, which is the focus of this study, is dealt with in the next two chapters. In the first part, the procedure of determining a building as risky is examined in detail and the processes from the acquisition of the necessary information about the building to the preparation of the technical report are explained and summarized in the flow diagram. In the next section, the processes of taking decision of demolition and reconstruction for the building detected as risky are explained and the necessary operations performed are shown as flow diagrams. While flow charts are being created, first the relevant sections of the legislation are scanned and then the basic steps of the process are identified. Determination of risky structure, demolition phase, decision of reconstruction and getting building permit are considered as basic steps in this study. The procedures described in the regarding legislation are classified and sorted according to these steps and flow diagrams are created. Flow diagrams are supported by responsibility matrices. Also, the legal processes that may be experienced in the implementation of the Law No. 6306 especially during the determination of a risky structure and taking decision for reconstruction by right holders. Additionally, the types of financial support provided by the state to the right holders in order to encourage the transformation process of risky buildings like rent assistance, interest support for mortgage credits, demolition credit, tax and charge exemptions are mentioned in this section. After the process starting from determination of a risky building to demolishing and obtaining reconstruction permit is explained in detail by flow charts and tables, the applications made in Municipality of Maltepe District during the transformation of a risky building are examined in this study. For this purpose, the scope and types of the data will be demanded from municipality is specified primarily. Then the data is taken from the file archieves of the municipality for the period after the Law No.6306 published in 2012 and analyzed. As a result of this analysis, first the numbers of risky structure detection reports, demolition and building permits are presented by tables and charts. The distributions are interpereted in terms of how transformation process proceeds in Maltepe Disctrict by years. Also the different and additional applications performed and documents used by Maltepe Municipality to minimize the possible faults are mentioned. After these general information is given about the applications made by Maltepe Municipality, more importantly, the problems experienced in the scanned files are examined, classified and listed together according to the basic phases mentioned at the previous paragraph.In the next conclusion section, the causes of the problems detected in this study are criticized and suggestions are made for the important and frequently seen problems and shown by tables. The results show that existing legislation and implementations performed during transformation of a risky building can be inadequate from many sides. Although, the necessity of such a law to transform huge building stock under disaster risk in our country is unquestionable, there are some unfair and unclear parts of the Law No.6306 and this prevents the widespread participation of residents of risky buildings to the transformation process. Besides, it is seen that the Zoning Law No.3194, which is one of the laws regulates urban transformation process, is still deficient and needs to be revised. This study is considered important in terms of evaluation of the whole transformation process of a risky building according to Law No. 6306, from the detection as risky to the stage of obtaining a reconstruction permit, and thus, it has s content that can guide and warn those who want to learn about this process. Moreover, in this study, the application process of the legislation related to the transformation process are examined in the Maltepe Municipality of Istanbul, which is the biggest city of our country, and it is considered to be a useful work in terms of providing the opportunity to see the problems in the regarding process.