TOPKAPI HOUSING

Student Concept Project, +4000 m², Istanbul, 2019 Spring

Environmental Concept

The project is located in the Historic peninsula, one of the most important areas of Istanbul and Turkey, in an area close to the walls. It was planned to build a livable, self-sufficient, ideal urban piece on an urban transformation area of approximately 35.000 m2. The region, which is a 2nd degree protected area, is surrounded by walls from the Ottoman and Byzantine periods and contains many historical buildings. The project area is a touristic rich area that has been used as a residential area since ancient times. While considering the general plan, the historical peninsula was planned as self-sufficient ideal cities, and the region where the project is located was considered as one of these urban fragments.

Among these urban particles, public buildings such as schools, hospitals, cultural centers, a bazaar center that meets the optimum needs of the urban particle, mixed buildings that will serve as trade and housing based on the main transportation axes, tourism structures such as hotels and markets that will serve the tourism needs, and finally It was aimed to include residences in the social structure, which the majority of It was aimed to create an ideal city structure by combining these urban particles. Some of the factors listed below were taken into consideration in the creation of the urban parts.

Architectural Concept

Within each urban particle, transportation should be provided on foot. Streets and streets should be designed with ideal vehicle road, pedestrian path, bicycle path, parking lot and greening dimensions according to the scale they will serve. In addition, vehicles that cannot find much space for parking on the street should be solved in the form of a common underground parking lot, which is at a convenient distance to each point within the urban particle.

The buildings to be solved by considering the silhouette balance should be solved in the most appropriate dimensions and forms possible, and should take care of the city and the living comfort. The distances between the walls surrounding the peninsula and the urban particle should be cleared of illegal structures and opened to use as a garden and park, as it was used in the past. In this way, a small part of the natural food demand sought in the city will be raised by the people of the city and the green area will contribute to a healthy ecosystem.

One of the most important step of development is conditions of the cities. Development of the cities consist on lots of measurements such as, habitation need, crime rate, transportation, traffic trouble, per capita income, social activities and participation of the citizens to those activities. Currently, troubles in urbanization, injustice in income distribution, termination of the livability of the rural areas and such conditions have created serious habitation problems in cities. Immigration, poverty and populist policies have boosted up the unplanned urbanization and therefore, have boosted up the need for habitation.

In this project, the importance of urbanization and housing in development and the sufficiency of the pre-managed studies about housing production to meet the increasing housing need have been examined. Topkapi's conditions have been studied afterwards; housing problems and policies which had been managed as a solution to those problems have been stated and finally suggestions for the solution to those problems have been tried to solved.