Urban resilience as a policy paradigm for sustainable urban planning and urban development: The case of Istanbul

It is clear that today we are experiencing a transformation to an era of human domination, which affects the environmental systems, triggers complexity and thus brings about unexpected changes in urban systems. Therefore, planning theory is currently in a chaotic state because of a number of challenges brought by those unexpected changes. Accordingly, it can be clarified that, 2000s are the periods when the complexity science was developed and there was an increasing necessity to plan and manage for the rapidly changing and growing disorders in urban areas. The main concern here has to find out a principal contribution to urban planning processes in order to address this complexity dilemma and urban vulnerability as its result. Since planning the future of an entire community may seem like a devastating challenge based on the increasing complexity and rapid changes in world dynamics, urban planning should comprise conscious choices about the future and it has to be a rational way for getting prepared for the future. In this regard, understanding well the physical, social, economic and institutional context and the maintenance of "continual development and adjustment to the changing circumstances" is surely vital for all urban systems. This perspective is parallel with the concept of resilience, which refers to understand how to address the changes and challenges of the uncertain world. Today, there is an increasing interest in resilience but yet no clear consensus in favor of its attributes or the conceptual expansion, besides, its relation with urban planning processes. For this reason, in the thesis, the origins, different perspectives, aspects and attributes of resilience were analyzed. Moreover, resilience is examined if it is a science or a theory so far, along with it is relation between the grounded concepts such as sustainability and vulnerability. Furthermore, a theoretical model to expose the relation between resilience and urban planning has been constructed based on the three different but complementary aspects of resilience which are defined as; "resilience to what" (what are the most crucial vulnerabilities that needs to be addressed urgently), "where" (where should resilience be provided) and "how" (what should be the core components of the "urban planning for resilience" framework). Next, this framework is integrated with and interpreted through "five elements process", which brought about an updated urban planning practice to foster resilience. These clarifications are constituted the hypothetical domain of the thesis, which leads to the empirical domain. Istanbul case is chosen in the empirical part since having the largest metropolitan population in Turkey and experiencing complicated changes with growing uncertainties in its urban structures for the last two decades. Today, Istanbul, with more than 14 million people, is one of the most attractive internal migration nodes in Turkey. Diverse service facilities of governmental and private institutions, employment opportunities, cultural and historical background have been stimulating thousands of people from different rural parts of the country. As a result of the rapid growth in population and urban dispersion, there has been significant pressure on the ecological life support systems of the region. Consequently, Istanbul shows high degree of complexity of dynamic ecological and relatively social, economic, cultural and political interrelationships, which makes it particularly vulnerable to changes and disorders. Additionally, there has not been a comprehensive plan covering the metropolitan area since 1995. Hence, the bottlenecks of planning processes or the necessity of sine qua principles has to be assessed and eventually redefined more wisely. In this sense, the mentioned three complementary aspects of resilience were formulated for Istanbul. With this regard, since it is crucial to identify who will be taking part in this process, an expert survey was conducted with the urban planning professional. So, first, who has to be in charge of the creation of urban resilience planning policies was identified. After justifying different stakeholder groups, then, the most vulnerable areas of Istanbul, the most pivotal key vulnerabilities and the policies addressing them were discussed with those different stakeholder groups. The discussion was handled through a two stage Policy Delphi Survey. The first stage of the Delphi was followed by a Public Opinion Survey, which is applied in the selected vulnerable areas. In this context, public participation was provided to reason the most important vulnerabilities citizens face and their perspectives/expectations to cope with those vulnerabilities. In the last step, second stage of Delphi was implemented to create the urban resilience planning framework as well as the urban policies and tools based on resilience principles parallel with the results of the first stage of Delphi and the Public Opinion Survey. The thesis is mainly attempting to elucidate how to provide a clear conceptual examination of the term resilience and eventually offer an outline for the integration with urban planning processes. Urban resilience planning is a recent concept and still there is not a unique approach to obtain it. Therefore, the presented outline cannot only help Istanbul to achieve sustainable and resilient urban development, but also be a useful tool for further studies.