Evaluation of the slow city model for sustainable urbanization in the context of social work: The case of Seferihisar

From past to present, cities are vital, political, or cultural centers, and they continue to exist as a spatial organization that reflects the dynamic and complex structure of heterogeneous human communities. However, as urbanization shows a "fast, distorted, excessive, fake, unbalanced and one-sided" development, it has created some problems such as environmental and infrastructure problems, housing insufficiency, unemployment, social and cultural structure problems, migration, and urban poor. Over time, these social problems made sustainable urbanization impossible and reactions to social problems emerged at the global level. The "Cittaslow" movement, which develops as one of these responses, is active in many areas from fair distribution of natural resources to sustainable local development, from environmental and infrastructure arrangements to social cohesion, from protecting historical and cultural heritage to protecting urban identity. This study tries to interpret the principles and criteria of the slow city movement together with the purpose and practices of social work in the context of sustainable urbanization. Qualitative research method was used within the scope of the study and the study is a critical instance case studies, which is one of the qualitative research approaches. For this purpose, the opinions of the people living in Seferihisar district of Izmir about "slow city" have been investigated in a large scale and in detail. Based on this, the participants of this research consist of 22 people living in Seferihisar district of Izmir. One of the participants is Seferihisar Mayor Tunç Soyer. The other 21 participants were chosen from disadvantaged groups. These groups are the old, poor, disabled and women. In order to identify certain subgroups and facilitate comparison and analysis, 3 or 5 people from each of the disadvantaged groups were determined as a subgroup. In addition, in order to better analyze the state of Seferihisar before and after it received the title of slow ity, the participants were selected especially from those who settled in the district before they were either born and raised in Seferihisar or Seferihisar took the title of slow city. In the research, interviews were made with a semi-structured form and the interviews were recorded with a voice recorder. The obtained data were analyzed by content analysis method. MAXQDA 18 Pro Analytics Program was used for this. As a result, it has been seen that the slow city movement can be successfully realized with the cooperation of the local people and the governing bodies. When the criteria of social change and development, social integration, empowerment, and liberation of the slow city are applied with the awareness and contribution of the local people, the main objectives of social work will be realized. The most inclusive principles of social work such as respect for human dignity and dignity, non-harm, respect for differences, protection of human rights and social justice seem possible with the implementation of the criteria of the slow city. Because local people have stated that Seferihisar is more problematic than before it was a slow city in cases where the criteria of the slow city are incomplete or not applied regularly. This situation brought the danger of the local people leaving Seferihisar, alienating from each other and deteriorating their social harmony. For this reason, the implementation of the slow city criteria serves as a social service by increasing the life quality of disadvantaged groups.