Housing Policies in Turkey: Evolution of TOKI (Governmental Mass Housing Administration) as an Urban Design Tool

Abstract

With the mission of absorption of the capital through urban renovation, AKP (the Justice and Welfare Party) took over the metropolitan municipality administrations in big cities in 1995, and the Government of the Republic of Turkey in 2002. Together with the 2003 Mass Housing Act, 14 legal regulations were enacted between 2002 and 2008 to expand the field of activity and increase the funds of TOKI (Governmental Mass Housing Administration) which was already established during ANAP (the Motherland Party) Government in 1980s. As a result of those regulations, TOKI, as the “latest goddess of the construction myth”, became the only authorized organization in the field of housing and land production in AKP’s cities. It acquired new duties from generating profit-oriented projects to protecting historical texture, and it was authorized to make and approve zoning plans for the lands and plots handed over to TOKI of the last government (the Justice and Welfare Party) created as an investor-entrepreneur-contractor-performer group. This paper’s aim is to indicate the transformation of TOKI foundation during the last twenty years, and also to prove that TOKI, as a governmental profit-oriented design tool, has demolished the unique DNA/morphological textures of the contemporary Turkish big cities by producing low profiled similar architecture and urbanity in the recent past.