Guiding place-based plans with local participation to address urban inequality: The case of İstanbul city council and its katilim kafe initiative

Abstract

Place-based plans are one of the established approaches of different sectors of governments in deprived neighborhoods. These plans can create tangible, fast, and low-cost solutions compared to, for instance, national or regional initiatives by central governments for education or housing. Although implementing place-based plans is controversial among scholars and practitioners due to their ineffectiveness in the long run to structural problems that are rooted in regional or national scales, such as unemployment, their potential to address contextual issues by emphasizing participatory planning promotes their implementation. In addition, local participation in planning processes can reflect inequalities that are (re)produced by urban spaces. This thesis refers to these contextual inequalities as urban inequality, which leads to unequal access to urban services and opportunities based on location. By facilitating place-based plans with participatory planning, there is a significant opportunity to guide place-based solutions and address urban inequality based on the knowledge, experience, and opinions of citizens. City Councils with an advisory role have been one of the formal governance mechanisms in Türkiye since the early 2000s. They act as a bridge between local governments, civil society organizations, citizens, and other stakeholders, pursuing the democratic participation of citizens in the framework of sustainable development. While some districts of Istanbul had already established City Councils, on the metropolitan scale, Istanbul City Council (ICC) was only established in 2019. This study aims to find out if place-based plans through participatory planning have been able to address urban inequality in the context of Istanbul by changing the physical development plans, which are prepared by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) and district municipalities. To this end, a qualitative case study on ICC and outputs of its district-scale participatory planning initiative named Katılım Kafe, including the action plan of this initiative in line with the action plan of Istanbul Vision 2050 prepared by the Istanbul Planning Agency under IMM has been conducted through 10 semi-structured in-depth interviews and content analysis of reports and documents. This thesis offers a deep understanding of ICC's capability to affect place-based plans through participatory planning methods to address urban inequalities, based on both its institutional capacities and the outcomes of the Katılım Kafe Initiative (KKI). Although the initial recommendations of citizens through KKI meetings and in the action plan of its outcomes show promising and valuable insights coming from local participants in these meetings and the potential of such a platform to reflect urban inequality, their incorporation into short-term development plans of Istanbul by IMM or district municipalities faces many obstacles. Some of these challenges lie in the institutional aspects of ICC including its relationship with the municipality, its limited resources and funding, and its low recognition among citizens of Istanbul. Moreover, the institutional obstacles also affect the quality and quantity of KKI meetings, leading to limited input from the main local stakeholders. By addressing the limitations and obstacles of both ICC and KKI in the future, with the support of local and central governments, place-based planning guided by local participation can effectively offer more enhanced and contextual solutions for the issues regarding urban inequality.