**3. Brownfield redevelopment in Turkey**

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 between Turkey and the EU after 1995.

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 perspective with very limited and partial assessments.

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 perspective of landscape architecture in a shrinking city of Turkey.

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

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 changes and the liberal economic policies following after the 1980s, the historical perspective and driving forces which have caused the brownfields are different.
