It is becoming ever more clear that cities in the future will not be a continuation of the twentieth century’s ones. The interdependence of economies, cultures and institutions at both global and local scales; assemblages of infinite numbers of objects and structures; interactions of agents and stakeholders in that physical environment; and information transmissions equally and pervasively through networks show how cities will change and evolve differently. Under this complexity cities could not be explained only by basic production and consumption relations as well as urban planning could not keep pace with planners’ desire only by long-term, static and similar land-use decisions. This brings about a new approach towards cities and urban planning. According to this approach cities are assumed to be complex systems, which are dynamic, non-linear, open and evolutionary, adaptive with emerging properties and self-organizing. Since the 1990s research and model studies based on the complexity theory have been accumulated to understand how cities evolve rather than formulating them. With the technological advents in computers and informatics it is possible to identify agents in a city and their relational behaviors while developing scenarios for the future after specifying phase-transitions and bifurcations in the process. By this way complexity in natural sciences could be adapted to social sciences. In this article, we compile prominent computational and mathematical modeling studies such as fractal cities and cellular automata cities in the complexity literature and critical and narrative studies that highlight strategic spatial planning and policy-making issues to open new urban planning approach up for discussion.

The changes in the social, economic, cultural, administrative and spatial restructuring process in the world cause changes in various fields, as well as in rural areas. With the effects of these changes, development policies of rural areas have entered to a new restructuring process. The problems in agriculture sector, which has been regarded as an important component of rural policy for many years, has accelerated the disintegration of rural areas. In addition to this situation; increase in poverty and deprivation in rural areas, increase in the development gap between rural and urban areas with the rural-urban dilemma and rapid depletion of natural resources in rural areas have required the differentiation of rural area policies. It has been seen that in rural areas that are identified with the agricultural sector, economic-based and state-initiated approaches have become inadequate with today’s neoliberal policies. There has been remarks that rural areas should be addressed with policies aiming at economic, social, spatial and environmental sustainable development, which requires multi-sectoral development and multi-actor governance, and that rural areas can be resolved through both sectoral and spatial approaches. This study aims to discuss in details about how the rural development policies in the world have changed together with the changes in the meaning of the rural areas and to answer the question of how Turkey’s rural development policies have been affected by this change. The study handles the issue with a comprehensive literature survey and discusses the changes in the rural development policies of Turkey with reference to development plans and strategy documents. The study focuses on the changes in Turkey’s current rural development policies within the context of the neoliberal policies and notably within the restructuring of the European Union’s harmonization process.

Today, urban growth and sprawl are cited among the factors causing the increase of human-induced greenhouse gas emission. Within this framework, the purpose of the study is to determine whether the spatial development of Bursa City between 1984 and 2014 has an effect on local climate change or not. Satellite images and climatic parameters were the data sources used in the study. The analysis and evaluation of the climate parameters were made by using Paired Samples t- Test. According to the results obtained from the study, the urban settlement grew sixfold between 1984 and 2014 while the urban population revealed an increase of two and a half. With the growth of the urban area, a reduction occurred in forests and agricultural land. As a result of the application of the Holdren Model, it was determined that the growth during 1995–2003 stemmed from the 65% urban sprawl. During the same period, an increase of 1.36°C in monthly minimum temperatures was observed from the local climate parameters. It may be said that the opening of the Bursa Plain to urban development has played a major role in this change. In conclusion, this study suggests on the one hand that urban growth has an effect on local climate change and, on the other hand that it draws attention to the role of spatial planning decisions in this process.

Nowadays, in Turkey as well as in other parts of the world the tendency of hosting mega events has increased owing to the employment of particularly branding promotion, marketing, and attracting investment funds as a tool for the local and regional development. This strategy has become an important tool of urban and regional development in the countries suffering from de-industrialization, and it has been widely used in the respective countries to trigger the economic development for the last 30 years. Some of the cities in Turkey have been hosting some of these international events since the mid 2000s. Within this context, this study elaborates the impacts of Erzurum, Trabzon and Mersin multi-sport events recently hold in Turkey. Overall, in this paper, it is aimed to unveil the extent of the rapid urban development and transformation desired by the central and local governments with the help of the mega events by focusing on the effects of the events concerned in the respective cities. The study portrays the physical, economical and socio-cultural change and transformations in urban fabric and space before, during, and after the Games period. By focusing on the planning and management of the projects realized in order to hold the events, the opportunities created for the development of the cities hosting the events will be examined within a critical context. The impact of such mega-events on the urban change are explored in terms of not only planning and management of the projects, but also the proper use and management of the infrastructures built as part of these events.

Even though urbanism is usually realized within a plan, it is sometimes formed by spontanous interventions of various actors. This study deals with the second type that includes small scale practices spontaneously realized in cities. The aim of this study is to examine the examples of these movements, which are known as ‘do it yourself urbanism’ (DIY urbanism) or ‘tactical urbanism’, in terms of their actors and purposes and to put forward the effects of these practices on urban space and urbanism process. To manage this aim, research techniques including literature review, media search, observation and case studies are used. The findings of this study shows that the actors involved in these movements are local people, activist groups, public institutions or municipalities, universities, private entrepreneurs and other individuals. It is found that the main purposes of these practices are resolving a need, providing urban easthetics or art, taking advantage of private or commercial benefits and reacting to various issues. The positive aspects of do it yourself urbanism are determined as having the possibility of beautifying and making urban space more livable, walkable and user friendly, providing direct participation of users in urbanism process and proposing practical, implementable and flexible solutions. Besides, there are negative aspects such as being illegal activities and having integration problems with comprehensive planning decisions.

The reciprocal relation between historical, economical and social developments and urban space also exists between urban memory and urban space. Therefore, the analysis of the dialectic relation between urban memory and urban space and investigation of environmental perceptipon and their representation in the memory provides substantial potentials for understanding the abstract repercussions of memory on urban space beyond conceiving it only as a physical asset. There are many questions on evaluation of the environmental perception and analysis of the representations on memory; how is the knowledge on urban space represented through cognition, what are the processes of that, what are the personal restrictions to express the experiences and perceptions on urban space, what are the convenient methods and tools for evaluating all of them. These questions have been still argued. However, thinking on “how” the truth is formed, or “how it left its mark” or “how it reproduced the meaning”, rather than “What the truth is” will provide opportunities to reconstruct the historicity. Thus, in this study, the representations of the urban space on urban memory is examined through the case of Mersin by using the oral history method. The reciprocal relation between urban space and memory is scrutinized through oral history interviews with inhabitants of Mersin, and the improtance of aforementioned relation and the problems embedded on urban space in relation to memory is discussed.

The expansion of the cities after the industrial revolution led to new urban dynamics and cities began to develop in a disorganized way according to arising new needs. This uncontrolled development brought the need for urban transformation/renewal in Turkey as well as in other countries. In Turkey, the terms ‘urban transformation’ has not clearly been understood by the city dwellers due to the increasing unearned income policies and unmonitored projects. This paper aims to draw attention to this problem and analyze the notion of urban transformation from the perspective of the city dwellers with a case study carried out in Alaybey-Izmir. In the case study which was implemented on two distinct groups, namely children and adults, the survey was employed for data collection. The findings reveal that both the children and the adults were able to detect the problems in their neighborhoods that cause transformation. But they understood the “urban transformation” differently from the definition given in the literature. Based on this result, it is suggested that the awareness of residents regarding the urban transformation should be raised. On the other hand, the expectations from the transformation project differ between children and adults. This result proves the claim that the studies from the perspective of adults cannot represent children. As is seen in the case study, children should be analyzed as a distinct subgroup in studies concerning the urban transformation.