The “Smart” Transformation of Cities in Turkey

Abstract

Smart city policies represent a process of comprehensive and multi-actor effort. Smart cities is undoubtedly a policy process that has reached maturity as Turkey has revealed a series of action plans and policy documents for many years. It can be accepted that Turkey's basic policy documents for the information society, published in 1999, starts with Turkey's National Information Infrastructure Master Plan (TUENA). The Information Society Strategy Action Plan (2015-2018), the Eleventh Development Plan (2019-2023), and the National Smart Cities Strategy Action Plan (2020-2023) are some of the recent documents. In this study, Turkey's roadmap of smart city that began with information society is analysed via policy documents. In the analysis, the concept of smart city, its components, vision, and goals were determined as the main topics. In this way, an overview of the policies followed between 1999 and 2023 will be made and the aspects that are intensely processed, incomplete or not mentioned will be tried to be revealed.