Confronted and Disappointed? Struggle of Turkish Planners against Authoritarian State-Regulated Urban Development

Planning in Turkey has always been a rather peculiar profession, in that while its regulation is based on strict top-down rules and principles, in implementation there are actually many grey areas of flexibility, informality, and exception. Moreover, planning education is based on the principles of modernist urban planning and design, and so with the creation of an ‘ideal city’ in mind, young planners, equipped with their newly acquired urban planning and design tools, find themselves facing the contradictions created by market domination, top-down bureaucracy, and informality in an increasingly neoliberal world in which private interests override the principles of ‘public interest’. This struggle has been made even harder by the increasingly interventionist and authoritarian regime in urban regulation under the leadership of the Justice and Welfare Party (AKP) government over the course of the last decade (Eraydin & Taşan-Kok, 2014; Lovering & Evren, 2011; Penpecioğlu, 2011). As a result of these ongoing complex processes, the taught value systems and principles of planning education contradict practice, and recent decades have shown that the gap between planning education and practice is growing. Lacking the instruments to fight authoritarian state-regulated neoliberalism, young planners, we argue in this chapter, are becoming disillusioned with their profession. The findings of this chapter are based on the findings of discussions with young planners (questionnaires, interviews) related to their setbacks, although we believe there is still hope for planning in Turkey. During our research, we came across many boundary-pushing planners, and this chapter will highlight the confrontations and disappointments, turning the spotlight on those who continue to struggle against authoritarian state-regulated urban development.