ENHR CONFERENCES 2012, Lillehammer, NORWAY
ATED COMMUNITIES IN BUILDING PLOT SCALE AND SOME LOCAL
CONFLICTS IN THE FENERYOLU QUARTER OF ISTANBUL
Abstract
This
paper aims to analyze the changing urban fabric of Istanbul, emphasizing the
discrepancies and contradictions between older housing patterns and the gated
communities in plot, a significant part of the recent typology of habitation.
The neighborhood of Feneryolu, which is a district on the Anatolian side of
Istanbul, is selected as the research field. It is observed that there
have been five different housing types since the beginning of settlement in
this neighborhood.
A
contradiction occurs between the existing housing pattern and newly emerging
gated plots. Even though the old Turkish house was built with a concern for
privacy and had concrete boundaries with pubic space, it still had a direct
relation with open space through its own yard. However, the new housing
formation constructs a boundary between private and public space which also
results in a lack of communication with open space. This boundary is created
through building safety walls and by locating the building detached from the street.
Consequently, the building entrance visually became inaccessible, the ground
level lost its housing function and the garden became unusable. So the
relationship between public and private spaces was transformed through those
changes, the house is detached from the urban space, and the street is
abandoned and marginalized.
Key
Words: Gated communities, apartmentalization, and housing
formation.
Introduction
All over the world, after 1980
political, economic, socio-cultural and spatial fragmentation, change and
transformation processes have appeared in the cities as a result of
globalization. Concepts like
polarization, social and spatial segregation, poverty, pluralism, localization
and decentralization have been put on the agenda of a new world system in
Istanbul metropolitan area. A new system emerged with the aim of getting a
share of the global market, by giving up production and savings; and pretending
to make important individual consumption. Identification and meaning of
production and consumption patterns have changed. The foremost factor impacting
on the generation of gated communities in Istanbul is security concerns. After
the 80s under the influence of globalization, the cities changed and an income
imbalance and gap in the urban population increased. Consequently rates have
also increased to threaten the inhabitants. To find a secure place to live has
become an important issue for the individuals in the city. The “need for
security”, the second in Maslow’s list of human needs, has become as crucial as
the need for shelter. (Pulat Gokmen, 2010).
Gated community is a concept that
refers to the housing formations implying identity, security and lifestyle and
has developed in various cities and countries over the last three decades. Many
researchers have proposed different definitions for this newly emerging
lifestyle and security based settlements, namely:
1.
Gated communities (Blakely and Snyder, 1997; Davis, 1992; Landsman, 2000; and Low, 2003),
2.
Gated enclaves (Grant, 2003),
3.
Edge cities (Garreau, 1991),
4.
Enclosed neighborhoods (Landman, 200) and
5.
Physically privatized areas where outsiders and
insiders exist (Levent and Gülümser, 2004).
In the last decades, Istanbul has
been facing rapid development of gated communities of various types. Those
housing formations have emerged in the last two decades and are rising in
number day by day. By November of 2011 there were 270 gated communities hosting
approximately 100,000 inhabitants, in various types and sizes of houses, and
offering various facilities (Pérouse, 2011). Those communities may be built as
villas or flats, most of the time their interior decoration is completed and
sold as turn-key projects. Whether they
are single unit houses or apartment blocks, they market both the concepts of
luxury, security and lifestyle. They offer a lifestyle that only high income
groups can realize, in a secure zone far away from the chaos of the city
center. Some of these settlements also provide its inhabitants a chance to
determine who will be their new neighbors.
.jpg)
Peripheral
gated community districts in Istanbul Kadıköy District
The archetypes of those settlements
in Istanbul are the vertical housing blocks built on the large plots of
demolished old, wooden mansions in the Kadıköy district. Then gated communities
spread to the outskirts of the city, as they were villa communities and needed
large areas. These villa-towns are designed as reproductions of old wooden
mansions (konaks) in a very different context (Pérouse, 2011). The former
provide only a housing function in relation to the existing urban life whereas
the latter claims to be an alternative to the city with various social
facilities.
As the concept of a gated community
becomes widespread, there occur various types capturing different needs and
tendencies of high-middle and high income groups in city. As classifying these
various types of newly emerging settlements, researchers have developed
different approaches to the classifications that vary according to the location
of the settlement in the city, the architectural typology of the buildings or
the facilities they contain.
According to Yıldız and Inalhan
(2007), there are mainly four types of settlements to be discussed within the
framework of that concept, namely:
1.
Garden cities,
2.
Gated-luxury housing,
3.
Multi-story residences and
4.
Mixed inner city housing.
In the context of Turkish
urbanization, garden cities built as suburbs and gated-luxury houses emerged in
the 1980s. The common characteristic of those two housing pattern is their
peripheral location; they are new settlements at a distance from the city
center. They enlarge the boundaries
of the city rather than affect the density of the existing housing stock. The garden cities are mostly built for the
upper-middle class and are not always gated. They may consist of villas and
apartments and they offer the middle class an opportunity to have a lifestyle
of their own, a personalized way of living rather than the lifestyle that the
city center imposes. The gated luxury houses also emphasize the concept of a
“new lifestyle” that the high income group can afford offering high security
and ultra-luxury. Both of these housing typologies were outside the city
center; however in the 1990s the tendency towards requiring luxury and security
reached the city center (Pulat Gokmen, 2010).
The third type mentioned above,
multi-story residence, is a housing type that offers services such as laundry,
food, room-cleaning etc. Those services refer to the life style that
middle-high and high income groups are searching for (Yıldız and Inalhan,
2007). As they are providing lifestyle, luxury and security, they were also
close to the city center. They were not renewal of the existing neighborhood
pattern but mostly were extensions of the city center. The mixed inner city
housing also includes social facilities, shopping centers and office blocks.
The latest examples such as the Kanyon project are close to the city center and
transportation nodes but draw their boundaries through security gates and
architectural design.
.jpg)
.jpg)
Kemer Country - Single unit houses
resembling old wooden konaks
Alkent
2000 - Single unit houses referring to various historical styles in an eclectic
way
According to Levent and Gülümser
(2004), gated communities in Turkey are classified as:
·
Vertical gated developments,
·
Horizontal gated developments,
·
Semi-horizontal gated developments and
·
Mixed type gated communities - town gated communities.
The first type refers to the
high-rise housing blocks located close to the city center and the central
business district. In Turkey, this type of blocks is defined as “residences”
and is designed in relation with shopping malls or office blocks. The second
type of housing consists of single housing units, built on large areas and
mostly situated on the urban periphery. The semi-horizontal gated developments
are apartment blocks situated in the city center whereas the latter type
represents a gated “town” of different types of housing types (Levent and
Gülümser, 2004).
.jpg)
Mixed-use vertical gated settlement
In summary, gated settlements in
Turkey vary in some of their characteristics but imply being closed to the
“outside world” which is the public space of the city. Whether they are
situated on the periphery or close to the city, they are newly emerging plots
rather than replacements for the existing buildings. While the gated
settlements of the 1980s and 1990s extended the built-area of the urban fabric,
there has been a tendency to renew the existing housing stock in last decade.
In Turkey, that “existing housing stock”, that is to say a major part of the
urban fabric, is mostly composed of apartment block neighborhoods.
This paper aims to extend the
concept of ‘gated community’ beyond existing definitions and classifications
through investigating the impacts on inner city neighborhoods. To understand
the effect of the “gated settlements in plot scale” formations on the
neighborhoods, first the change of the notion of housing in the selected area
is to be discovered. The housing history
of the area and the story of the transformation of the houses from konaks to
“gated” apartment blocks were revealed through detailed archival studies, and
the effect of that change on the relations between house and street is tried to
be understood.
After defining the layers of
transformation, newly emerging apartment block types are discussed in terms of
their resemblance with gated settlements. The gated communities in Turkey are
mostly situated around the periphery of the city. Single housing units are
hidden behind walls. The concept of safe housing in city center is exemplified
as “residences”. Though those residences
are in the city center, they are not connected with the city as part of the
usual housing pattern of the city. The transformation of that pattern, which is
a combination of an organic relation between housing units and streets, into a
pattern of detached gated blocks is a new tendency which has irreversible
effects on the structure of the urban space.
Case Study: Transformation of the neighborhood into a
housing pattern composed of detached, gated settlements on plot scale
Borough
of Kadıköy and the Feneryolu District
The selected area, the Feneryolu
district, is a neighborhood in the borough of Kadıköy in Istanbul. This
neighborhood became an area of settlement in the late 19th century. The first
housing pattern of the neighborhood was the wooden mansions situated on large
plots with a high concern for privacy. By the 1940s those large plots were
divided into smaller plots and single housing units were built on each. The
strong privacy of the wooden houses was transformed into a high degree of
openness to the street. After single housing units with the rise of
apartmentalization in Turkey, Feneryolu was also affected and four-story
apartment blocks became the dominant typology of the neighborhood. Despite some
changes in building codes, in the 1970s the apartment blocks were allowed to be
built up to 7 floors. Although the vertical character of the neighborhood
changed, the architectural style of the block remained similar to the former
examples, and the relation between house and street was still in a very direct
manner. In the 1980s the direction of the apartmentalization process shifted to
a more closed relation with the public space, and private space started to lose
contact with the street. Concurrently, the concept of gated communities rose in
these years. This development of the newly emerging notion of security and
being closed to the outer world affected the inner city. As the elevation of
the house was an interface to contend with life in the street in the early
periods of housing development of the district, in the last phase of the
housing story of the district, it became a boundary surface to detach the house
from the public space. The gated settlement in plot scale is not a housing
typology which emerged all of a sudden, but which came into existence through
the constant change and transformation of the existing housing patterns under
the influence of global housing tendencies.
First Layer: The
wooden mansions in gardens Second Layer: Single Housing Units
Third and fourth layers: Early apartmentalization Fifth Layer: Examples of high-rise apartments
Sixth Layer: Gated settlement in plot scale
To understand the current
house-street structure of the neighbor, it is significant to understand how
that structure was before the last phase of the housing pattern. The layers of
transformation in Feneryolu are namely:
1.
First Layer: wooden single houses (beginning of the 20th
century),
2.
Second Layer: single housing unit (1930s-1964),
3. Third
Layer: early apartments, -low rise blocks (1964-1973),
4.
Fourth Layer: early apartments, middle rise blocks
(1973-1985),
5.
Fifth Layer: late apartment blocks, detaching the
house from the street (1980s-1990s) and
6.
Building the boundary to the street: gated settlements
in plot scale (1990s-present day).
First layer Second Layer
Third & Fourth Layer Fifth Layer
Sixth Layer
Figure 1: Relation between house and the street at all layers
First Layer: Wooden Single Houses (Konaks)
Feneryolu is one
of the suburbs of Istanbul emerging at the beginning of the 20th century. The
railroad between Kadıköy and Gebze started functioning in 1908 and Feneryolu
was one of the stations on that route. The neighborhood became a summer house
settlement consisting of wooden mansions/konaks on large plots, covered with a
garden of dense trees. Those konaks are comparable to gated communities, but
unlike them, they did not exclude urban life and the street. They only provided
privacy for the inhabitants. This privacy was achieved by placing the konak in
the center of the plot and curtaining the house through trees. In the early
times of the neighborhood, the street pattern used to be very different from
the current pattern. There was the main road, called “Feneryolu Avenue” and all
konaks were connected to that road through garden gates and porticos leading to
the house building. The yards of the konaks were open to neighbors’ visits and
used daily. The privacy of konaks was not an attempt to exclude outsiders. As
there was not any street pattern, there was no concern about the relation
between the house and the street. A konak is an intimate housing space greatly
benefiting from the garden. As can be
seen in the table, the elevation of the konak was very transparent and opens to
the garden. Konaks were not gated settlements with the building of
security walls or barbed wire fences. As is common in every period of change,
they were the agents of a new lifestytle. This was an inherent outcome of the
house, and was not prompted through ads or marketing techniques. Also the
wooden konak pattern did not imply gathering a community of similar income
groups and lifestyles. Figure 1 shows
the relations between the house itself, the garden and the street. The konak is
a complete entity with its housing space and its garden. The contact between
the house and its outdoor space is very direct.
Second
Layer: Single Housing Unit (1930s-1964)
In the Early Republican period, the single housing units
were the symbols of a modern life. As the wooden mansions symbolized the
Ottoman way of life, the architectural style of housing was also transforming
along with the young republic (Bozdoğan, 2005). Those houses demostrated common characteristcs with the
wooden mansions in terms of their being independent and their high level of
interaction with the outer space of the building itself. A very dramatic change
between the two layers was that the latter became more open to the street.
Street, garden and house became integrated and the privacy of the wooden
mansion was weakened. However, the effective usage of the garden was common in
both types. The whole garden was used by a single family and it was the
extension of the housing unit. Only a low fence would separate the plot and the
garden, whereas the mansion was hidden behind the trees (Figure 1).
Third
layer and fourth layer: Early apartment block period (1964-1985)
After the law of divided co-ownership was insured, owners
of single housing units built apartment blocks on their plots. A rapid change
in the density and height of the district occurred, and new, four-story
apartments became the dominant type. In spite of that shift from independent
houses to shared apartment blocks, the street-house relation was not damaged.
Housing blocks were located very close to the street and the elevation facing
the public space was highly transparent. Also the balconies acted as an extension
of the house to the street in order to maintain the “interface” function of the
housing unit. As the gardens were under the ownership of multiple inhabitants,
the frequency of their usage was weakened when compared to the former layers of
independent houses.
The fourth layer identified in Feneryolu consists of middle-rise
apartment blocks, built between the years 1973-1985. These housing units with
varying heights between 5-7 storys were very similar to the third layer in
terms of openness to the street, having transparent elevations and large
balconies. The only change that was detected was the decrease in the green
areas of the plot and the spreading of concrete pavements and parking lot
areas.
Fifth Layer: Late Apartment Blocks - Detaching the house from the street
Until the middle of the
1980s, building codes would enable houses to be built up to a pre-determined
height. However the municipalities introduced an “unrestrained height”
regulation which determined the maximum height of the building according to the
plot area and the base area of the building. This regulation gave way to the
high-rise apartments that started to dominate the district. Other than the
obvious change in the silhouette of the neighborhood, the public-private
relations and street-house fabric changed. As the housing block rose in height,
the elevation became opaque in comparison to the former apartment blocks.
Elevation transforms from being an interface towards being a boundary, with
some kind of a wall enclosing the private space to the public space. The green
paved area turned into a transitional area and a parking lot which was very
rarely used for daily activities.
Another important change
was that the balconies were designed smaller than earlier apartment blocks and
were mostly used as a storage area. In some examples balconies are enclosed by
PVC elements. Both the balconies and gardens were used less, and the relation
between the house and the outdoor usages started to disappear from the regular
physical and behavioral pattern of the district. This layer of housing can be
considered as a crucial step of formation of the “gated settlement in plot
scale”.
Sixth Layer: Constructing the boundary to the street: “Gated settlements
in plot scale”
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the housing
pattern in Feneryolu has gone through a constant change which has produced six
different, co-existing layers of housing. Until the 1980s the house was in
direct contact with outdoor space and, konaks being an exception, with the
street. However since the 1980s the housing block started to be an enclosed
private space. Exporting the concept of security from the trend of gated
communities in the city, security cabins
and entrance lobbies started to appear. Also the placement of the apartment
block has changed. As in the early apartmentalization period, the building is
placed in the nearest part of the plat to the street; the enclosed housing
block shifts to a location at a distance from the street. An entrance gate is also
a typical feature of that typology.
Balconies which functioned as an extension of the closed
private space in relation to the public space of the street, completely
disappears and the elevation becames a mere surface only to act as the boundary
between the indoors and outdoors. The pool seen in the example above is also an
element designed with the impact of the housing trends on a global scale.
Another important feature are the advertisements on billboards of the
construction sites of these new emerging blocks, depicting the interior
decoration of the dwelling to future inhabitants. Both the fabric of the
neighborhood and the physical features of the housing blocks have dramatically
changed in the last two decades.
CONCLUSION: Contradiction of coexistence of the existing urban tissue
and the divided neighborhoods
The idea of the gated
community is a concept which has emerged since the 1980s and is spreading in
the urban space in different forms and characteristics. Gated communities
mainly refer to settlements excluding the city whether built on the periphery
or close to the city center, and expand new housing areas. As they are shaping
the city, they also have impact on the existing city pattern. The housing stock
in the city is constantly changing and renewing itself by producing a layered
structure of neighborhoods. These layers are also affected by the global
housing trends. In the last two decades gated community development has started
to transform the neighborhoods in the city center.
Other than the existing
classification of gated communities, the case study that this research is based
on demonstrates a newly emerging housing tendency which is defined as “gated
communities in plot scale”. When a new gated settlement is built on an empty
lot, its effect on a city occurs in terms of expanding the built area by
constructing new relations with the existing city space. However when the
existing housing stock is transformed, the inherent relations of the city space
are deconstructed in a very different context.
As the old housing pattern which has a direct relation with the street
and outdoor space is still in use, these enclosed and exclusive formations of
housing start to spread over the housing tissue. So this encounter of an
inclusive way of settlement and the gated settlements in plot scale result in a
contradiction and differentiation in the urban space. It is observed that in
the last decade, of the Feneryolu district has been transformed and most of the
construction has taken place since 2006. When it is considered that the other
neighborhoods in the city would also exhibit such tendencies, it can be
foreseen that through this transformation, the gated way of housing will be the
dominant typology in the city and the existing organization of the city will
change irreversibly. The contact between the private space of house and the
public space of the street will be broken and the neighborhood will be stacks
of detached housing units, abandoned streets and concrete parking lots rather
than an integrated composition of streets, gardens and houses.
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Burcu ARIKAN (Architect)
Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Architecture, Taskisla, Taksim, 34437 Istanbul, Turkey,
e-mail: burcu.arkn@gmail.com
Prof. Dr. Gulçin PULAT GOKMEN
Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Architecture, Taskisla, Taksim, 34437 Istanbul, Turkey,
e-mail: ggokmen@itu.edu.tr
