Like in many other developing countries under globalization and structural change processes, Turkey has experiencing great deal of changes in its urban structures fort the last two decades. Among them urban regeneration is one of the highly debated planning issues in the last decade. In addition to major structural changes like integration of urban fringe to the core, de-industrialization, urban sprawl and re-invention of the city center as cultural domain; planning issues such as renewal of historical areas, disaster mitigation planning in risk prone zones, and re-development of brown field areas have put a complex agenda in urban planning practice. In the recent decade, the central government in Turkey has issued several legal planning tools to enable urban regeneration projects in Istanbul and in many other cities. However, in many cases these legal arrangements were acted as ad-hoc solutions for case-specific urban regeneration projects and the empowerment of some central state organizations such as State Housing Authority (TOKI) and Privatization Authority (OIB) in plan making process have caused fragmentation in urban planning process in Turkey. In this paper some selected urban regeneration cases will be scrutinized in order to explain the current actors and their roles in plan making process. An assessment will be made on the effects of Neo-liberal approaches to current planning issues in Istanbul and a discussion will follow about the possible outcomes of fragmentation in urban planning practices.
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