We Professionals Concern about the Future of our Capital City

In the panel of the TMMOB Ankara Branch of the Chamber of Architects, experts discussed future of Ankara, her loosing identity. All professional from various disciplines claimed that a Republican, modern, and a contemporary city turned into an unplanned town that struggling with transportation problems, and lost its memory and nature.

Ankara Branch of the Chamber of Architects continues its activities on World Architecture Day. Within this scope, they have organized a panel titled “Discussing the Future of the Capital” which was the subject of the urbanization of the last 25 years in Ankara due to its 93-year anniversary of assigning Ankara as capital city of Turkey. Chairperson of the Department of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, Bilkent University, Bülent Batuman has been the moderator of the panel and Erhan Öncü, C. Abdi Güzer, Oktan Nalbantoğlu and Ali Ekber Doğan participated  as panelists.

Ankara was transformed into a confrontation platform of ideology and space.

Chair of Ankara Branch of the Chamber of Architects, Tezcan Karakuş Candan:

“We all live in a process where ideology is reflected in the place, and it is an environment of conflicts with the practices of local and central power”.

‘We will make Ankara livable again parcel by parcel’

“How we can eliminate the destruction of the city with all these extraordinary state and superstate processes that we will evaluate in the 25th anniversary of Ankara’s Gökçek administration, how we can imagine a new capital, we will talk about them. Nothing can stop us from our struggle. We will continue to fight in all conditions, we will continue to plant seeds of hope for Ankara”.

‘Ankara has becoming an unlivable city’

Moderator of the panel, Bülent Batuman:

“The conditions in the urban sense do not look very bright. We will evaluate the past 25 years. It is this 25-year-old character that political Islam holds the city administration. The first one is the only one in the municipalities where the second part is in the conditions of both local and central power”.

Transportation expert Erhan Öncü has assessed the last 25 years of Ankara’s transportation in terms of legibility and visibility:

“Projects were implemented in Ankara before transportation policies were established. In summary, unplanned highway connections and extensions were made in Ankara from 1990 to 2015. Road extensions, road junctions, road improvements that were not in the transportation master plan were all done, at the same time; they tried to plan on one side. There were no railway systems, and no pedestrian network with a plan. This is a very serious problem”.

‘The transportation master plan died before it was born’

Öncü continued his words as follows:

“The opening of green areas to construction, business premises for shopping mall construction, all these are the background of 25 years of development”.