**3.1. Policies, strategies, driving forces**

**3. Brownfield redevelopment in Turkey**

perspective with very limited and partial assessments.

between Turkey and the EU after 1995.

140 Sustainable Urbanization

The term "brownfield" or, as in the Turkish case, "former industrial area" has been recently introduced to Turkish agenda and is often related to the process of industrial decentralization and privatization of government‐owned firms through state's liberalization policies. On the other hand, as the result of European Union membership attempts, many manufacturing industries had to stop their operations due to the impact of establishing the customs union

As a new phenomenon, brownfields redevelopment has been subject to academic research in Turkey since the beginning of the twenty‐first century. The recent research about brownfields redevelopment in the country generally handled the issue from historical heritage preservation

Most of these scholarly studies deal with the preservation of industrial plants and buildings on the brownfields as important indicators of the former industrial identity of the cities and approach the issue as a design and conservation problem [8–22]. Almost all of these papers are concerned with brownfield sites at metropolitan areas such as Istanbul, Ankara, Bursa, Eskisehir, Izmit. As a general concluding remark, the political and legal uncertainties are emphasized in these writings. Koksal [19] also focuses on the insufficiency of brownfield‐ related inventory and highlights the necessary of analysis of the documentation for the old industrial plants as a form of historical archaeology. Asiliskender [9] argues in his Ph.D. dissertation the importance of the protection of these lands as symbols of Turkish modernity. Some of this research evaluates the brownfield redevelopment issue through urban regener‐ ation concepts and policies and tries to put forward some proposals for alternative uses in order to connect these sites with other urban functions [23, 17, 24, 16, 18, 25, 15, 26, 27].

The other remarkable issue in these studies is the lack of interest in contamination‐ and environmental‐related issues. Contamination is mentioned as an obstacle only in the paper of Turer Baskaya [28] and with a very limited focus. Another significant study which uses the term "brownfield" is the Ergen's Ph.D. Dissertation. Ergen [29] analyses the issue in terms of sustainable development with a focus on environmental impacts of abandoned lands from a

There is no doubt that Turkish urban development and related issues are very different from Western countries. But in globalized world, there is a need to understand the specific and

Turkey, as a centralized country which is shifting its policies toward administrative decen‐ tralization and EU membership, has many difficulties in sustainable brownfield redevelop‐ ment, as in other regeneration projects. The complexity of brownfield redevelopment requires substantial efforts in the planning process to investigate contamination on the sites, to estimate market demands and to communicate with stakeholders. However, in Turkey, this compli‐ cated process has been challenged by rapid urbanization for decades, and the roots and policies for brownfields have had a process distinct from United States and other Western countries experiences [30]. Although there are many similarities in terms of globalization, technological

worldwide problems and to develop the most proper solutions to eliminate them.

perspective of landscape architecture in a shrinking city of Turkey.

Brownfield‐related policies in Turkey represent the impacts of privatization and neoliberal policies after 1980s. In addition to the central role of the government, the strategies and priorities of local governments through their ideologies reshaped the cities, especially İstanbul. There is no doubt that the accomplishment of a sustainable brownfield redevelopment is directly related with the economic/social structure and environmental priorities of the countries. Turkey, as a developing country has been in a dilemma between economic devel‐ opment and environmental protection. The distinctions in industrialization process, social, economic, and politic structure necessitates to evaluate the sustainable brownfield redevel‐ opment issue in its own dynamics.
