Post occupancy evaluation of slum area regeneration implementations: Zafertepe District and Portakal Çiçeği Valley

The city is like a living thing. The process, which starts with the birth and growth of the city, sometimes becomes sick and is interrupted. The efforts to heal the city within this process has started with the industrialisation and later accelerated due to immigration and natural disasters. Industrialisation has become an important milestone in terms of the development and regeneration of the cities. Especially poor and illegal housing required renovation actions in order to renovate the city centres which have started to lose their appeal. At this point, urban renewal concept is a multidimensional concept which analyses how the cities should be regenerated with all these changes. Laws are passed as a solution to slum areas and regeneration on these areas are realized with improvement zoning plans. Different solutions were sought for ongoing slum problem and urban regeneration projects have come up. On slum areas, which were approached with improvement zoning plans and urban regeneration projects, only cleaning the area from the slums, in other words only the physical aspect of the matter was dealt with and social aspects were neglected. However, the literature puts emphasis on the fact that urban problems should be the starting point in determining regeneration areas not the income and forms of implementation should be structured according to time and place while emphasizing that urban regeneration should be addressed with economic and social aspects at the first place. While literature often includes such discussions, studies on the success level of spatial practices which are shaped with physical regeneration are limited. However, most of the physical regeneration practices have deficiencies in technical and spatial terms and more significantly in terms of user characteristics. The starting point of the present study is to identify these deficiencies comparatively on two sample areas, one of which is regenerated with improvement zoning plan and the other is regenerated with urban regeneration project, and open them up for discussion. The study is structured on spatial regeneration concept. Social and economic aspects of the regeneration is not included in the study. However, the research method which approaches shaping the place with user profile gives important hints about the economic and social aspects of the regeneration.