In Combating Urban Disasters, Reading the Urban Renewal Practices within the Scope of Law No. 6306 Through Turkey’s Disaster Situation

Abstract

Disaster, which has been a great danger to humanity throughout history, has become a priority issue for urban planning due to the loss of life or property in cities. From the proclamation of the republic to the 2000s, cities were intervened with various planning decisions. In the 2000s, apart from these decisions, a new era has been entered in the fight against disasters in cities with the urban renewal interventions that started to be included in the legislation. In particular, law no 6306 ‘Law on the Renewal of Areas Under the Risk of Disaster’, which started to be included in the laws in 2012, aims to implement urban transformation only for the disaster risk areas identified in the cities. Although the law is an important form of intervention against urban disasters, it does not make criteria or definitions for risky area determination. Due to this gap in the law, it is the hypothesis of the study that the law numbered 6306 cannot be fully implemented within the scope of disaster relief. In line with the hypothesis put forward, it has been obtained that risky area announcements within the scope of Law No. 6306 published in the ‘Turkey Official-Gazette’ from the date of the law to the present, that is, from May 2012 to November 2021 and Turkey's disaster situation from various institution reports and studies. The aim of the study is to reveal both the spatial and chronological relations of these data obtained. While comparing the two data, spatializations were made with the ArcGIS program, and the number and locations of the announcements were statistically analyzed with the SPSS program. In line with the investigations, it is one of the findings obtained that after the disasters that cause great losses in Turkey, the risky area announcements increased in those regions. As a result, as in the hypothesis of the study, the fact that the risky area announcement criteria are not fully specified in the law causes the priority disaster risk areas to not be fully determined.