Public mass housing practices in Turkey: the urgent need for research-based spatial decision-making

In Turkey, the Housing Development Administration (HDA/Toplu Konut Idaresi-TOKI) became a major public actor in the housing market in the 2000s by undertaking nearly ten per cent of the annual national housing production. Going forward, HDA plans to further increase its rate of housing in the coming years with an even wider scale of urban transformation across the country in line with central policies. To date, the implementation strategy for public mass-housing has had an overall prescription, mainly based on the quickest and cheapest means of mass production. However, shortcuts taken to reduce the costs have so far bypassed critical architectural and planning priorities, resulting in friction among different actors and further socio-economic problems. This study reviews the background of public mass housing and urban transformation attempts in Turkey, concentrating on research and implementation experience of HDA in the 1990s and 2000s with a historical perspective. Taking a closer look at the basic spatial decision-making (SDM) mechanism behind its social housing provision and briefly discussing the controversies of urban transformations it participated in, the study addresses the common shortfalls of the current public housing practice in the light of the existing research and experience in the country. The study calls for the re-establishment of a comprehensive research basis independent from bureaucratic actors to ground the practice on and help sustain the built environment.