Competitive cities, quality of urban life, sustainability, participatory planning, governance, and other such concepts comprise an important part of the popular planning discourse in Turkey. Since the Habitat II Summit in Istanbul in 1996, in particular, we have been witnessing a growing tendency towards the use of this discourse by local authorities in their public hearings of new plans or projects. In cases of discrepancies between the principles of this discourse and the economic, social and institutional dynamics, the concepts on which the discourse is built are often hollowed out and converted into a legitimization tool of controversial planning practices. This paper examines the Turkish planning system’s capacity for creating livable urban spaces by focusing on skyscrapers, which were built in Istanbul between 1990 and 2009. The spatial distribution of these skyscrapers, the market value generated through them and their distribution among urban actors are also investigated.

Urban spaces today have become commodities in production, circulation and consumption. While globalization accentuates the commodification of urban spaces on an international scale, cities, on the other hand, have become areas where investments of both local and global capital concentrate. In this process, cities in countries located in different geographies compete with one another, and urban spaces are becoming much more alike. Even cities that have fallen outside global competition are influenced by this transformation, as they go through the processes of assimilation and uniformification in their wish to resemble cities in a geography and with a culture other than their own. Midyat is a city with a multi-cultural structure containing religious and ethnic diversities, and thus it is referred to as the “city of faiths and tongues”. Since the 1980s, the terror acts in the region and the migration that followed have greatly affected the social structure of the settlement. As Assyrians and Yazidis, important cultural and social contributors in Midyat, left the region, Kurds fleeing from settlements disturbed by the acts of terrorism or who were part of the mandatory migration settled in the vacated areas. The changing population structure of Midyat has also altered the spatial characteristics of the city. Urban spaces containing the traces of the cultural diversity of the city are being replaced by structures resembling the building developments in large cities, and the city has been undergoing a process of uniformification with other cities. This article evaluates the process of uniformification experienced in Turkish cities through the example of the Midyat case.

The retail sector has been experiencing a rapid and continuous change worldwide. There have also been profound changes in Turkey, especially after the 1980s. Both the retail sector and the urban retail environments have been altered radically. One of the most significant indicators of this change is the proliferation of western-type large-scale retail developments. Past experiences in developed countries have shown that the uncontrolled development of large-scale retail areas results in some undesired socioeconomic and physical outcomes, such as decline in the cultural and commercial activities of city centers, damage in existing retail workforce structure, and change in local retail hierarchy, nearby land uses, traffic loads and original architectural identity. Many countries have put into practice restrictive and regulatory policies to prevent these negative effects. As similar transformations have also been realized in Turkish retail environments, many institutions think that similar legal regulations must be implemented in Turkey as well. The present study investigates the ongoing retail change within the Turkish context, explores the legal and structural regulatory policies of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, and critically discusses the appropriate retail regulation policies for Turkey.

Istanbul is a city clearly exposing the transformative effects of the flows of people, commodities, money and information. Throughout this process, the urban and architectural context of Istanbul has been changed and reproduced. Especially starting from 2000, since the flow of information and capital has accelerated globally and Istanbul is situated on the main route of that flow, significant changes have emerged in the physical, social and economic patterns of Istanbul. In this context, there have been primarily two means of change in the physical pattern of Istanbul. On the one hand, new functional areas that absorb the demand of global capital have emerged, while on the other, a new architectural language has appeared in terms of material and form. This paper aims to understand the general spatial characteristics of global cities under the said continuous flows. It focuses on the recently changed urban pattern and architectural language of Istanbul by providing the viewpoints of innovative architectural offices that closely follow the improvements in the world regarding global architectural language and computer-generated digital forms.

In recent years, particularly in Istanbul and other major cities, the important building type that offers a new lifestyle, as objects of consumption, is residences. The concept of residence that has been widely used in the construction sector accommodates a variety of different meanings according to the defined building’s intended use, construction year, construction place, and target users. Even if the concept is often used across the different disciplines, its definition is still not fully defined and goes beyond the lexical meaning. Therefore, it was intended in this study to define “residence” over different partners in the construction sector, as architects, investors, real estate marketing experts, and users. It was also aimed to identify reasons for the formation and preferences of residences and to discuss the results in the context of Istanbul.