Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

This study addresses urban transformation under economic restructuring and the social change in the postmodern through the example of the agglomeration which is Istanbul. The city is particularly suitable as it takes an intermediate position between the well-studied metropolises of the high-tech countries of the West and the megacities of the developing countries, by showing elements of both fundamental types of rapidly growing and changing megacities. The work examines the phenomenon of urbanization on the basis of selected structures and processes in Istanbul. The urban transformation processes that take place in Istanbul between 1990 and 2008 are described with the help of available statistical data sets. For this purpose, the most important urban structural features of the transformation processes are investigated. This is done by means of a methodological approach, which allows the combination of different statistical spatial units and heterogeneous databases. For this reason, different spatial types have been matched which are comparable with one another in the course of time and thus make the transformation process detectable. For the description of these processes and factors, the main questions of the work are oriented on the cause and effect relations of urban transformation derived from the theoretical frame-work of postmodern urbanization. The focus is on three spatial transformation processes in Istanbul that shape the development phases and transitions between 1990 and 2008. Between 1990 and 2000, Istanbul was in a phase of expansion into the periphery, which is mainly supported by poorer population groups. As a result, the spatial polarization, which is dominantly present in 1990, dissolves. In the transition to 2008, the expansion is still present, but weakened, and is accompanied by the migration from periphery to center. As a result, a fragmented, patchwork-like spatial pattern is formed. This is the typical complexity that is distinctive for many metrop-olises in the transformation process with partial contradictory spatial structural processes.