Research Information System
Complex [Cognitive] Cities: Sensing, Planning + Design in Urban Transformations, AESOP21 Special Group Planning + Complexity, Manchester, England, 20 April 2023, pp.9, (Summary Text)
Top-down and modernist urban planning practices are criticized for lacking an understanding of how cities actually work and disregarding the complexity of cities (Jacobs, 1961), and, as a result of complexity thinking, our understanding of cities has been transformed. Cities are now recognized as dynamic, non-linear, open, and complex systems (De Roo, 2010). According to De Roo and Rauws (2012), being a complex system, cities are self-organizing in response to internal influences and have an adaptive capacity to respond to external factors. In a dynamic and non-linear world, planning includes both anticipated and unforeseen changes resulting from internal and external influences. Portugali (2000) also indicates that cities are self-organizing systems and, to a large extent, unplannable. There is a need to move beyond providing descriptive outcomes when attempting to understand urban space's dynamic change and development. Understanding the complex, self-organized structure of cities that results from accumulating different variables through history is essential. Especially in urban regeneration projects and their implementation processes, these changes hold a rich ground for revealing unpredictable local emergencies through appreciation or collective resistance arising from local conditions.
In Turkey, particularly after the 2000s, while urban regeneration projects have become the driving force of the economy and tool in managing urban development, they have also become a means of capital accumulation for the reproduction of urban space as a result of the growing state power and highly authoritarian form of neo-liberalism (Lovering & Türkmen, 2011). Nevertheless, although there is a highly institutionalized conflict between the central and the local government, in Izmir, the local government operates a different model of urban regeneration through innovative and participatory approaches. Ege neighborhood, one of the oldest neighborhoods of Izmir, mainly with a Roma population, was declared as an urban regeneration project area by the local government in 2012, and today, the construction in the first phase of the project is still continuing. During the process, the local government has adopted an approach to acting together and carrying out the process with transparent and participatory practices by addressing the demands of the residents. Still, both conflicts and collaborations have emerged during the process between different actors varying from central government to local government, from right holders to occupiers.
This research aims to discover the clues of co-evolutions and adaptations as new circumstances appear during the urban regeneration process. In this direction, the research utilizes primary sources obtained through interviews conducted and secondary sources, namely the plan and legal documentation compiled during the field visits. As a result, it is seen that different actors can generate different types of capacity through their representations, which also affects adaptation. Hence, alternative approaches by going beyond certainties and uncertainties and incorporating self-organizational and adaptive capacities are developed through the process.
References
De Roo, G. (2010). Being or becoming? That is the question! Confronting complexity with contemporary planning theory. In: de Roo, G, Silva, EA (eds) A Planner's Encounter with Complexity. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 19-40.
De Roo, G., & Rauws, W. S. (2012). Positioning planning in the world of order, chaos and complexity: On perspectives, behaviour and interventions in a non-linear environment. In Portugali J, Meyer H, Stolk E & Tan E (Eds.), Complexity theories of cities have come of age. Berlin, Germany: Springer, pp. 207-202.
Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. New York: Random House.
Lovering, J., & Türkmen, H. (2011). Bulldozer neo-liberalism in Istanbul: The state-led construction of property markets, and the displacement of the urban poor. International Planning Studies, 16(1), pp. 73–96.
Portugali, J. (2000). Self-organization and the city. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.