"ANKARA 2015" PLANINA ÖVGÜ

Ankara has the air of the great cities, with a clearly readable structure of a state capital: the major coordinators of the city's street network bear the names of the first two presidents of the republic: the Atatürk Bulvarı which connects Ulus, Kızılay and Çankaya as the north-south axis of the city and the İsmet İnönü Bulvarı, which crosses it in an east-west direction. The "Palace" functions - the Parliament, the army headquarters, the numerous garrisons, the Presidential Palace, the embassies and the residences of the ambassadors - are located along and south of ismet İnönü Bulvarı. The modern "Market" functions, the shopping facilities, banks and office buildings have been established in a substantial breadth dXongAtaturk Bulvarı. The Bulvar links the "Palace" with the "Temple" functions of the town which are concentrated in Ulus, where the past can be traced back to the times of the Hittites and where people can get pride and confidence through feeling the continuity of Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and early-Republican civilizations as well as enjoy the facilities offered by a great recreational and cultural park. Ankara is often regarded as a new capital. In fact Europe had only four real big capital cities in the pre-îndustrial era: London, Paris, Vienna and İstanbul. The others could have been classified only as seats of royal or ducal courts, or governments. Madrid, Barcelona, Brussels, Petersburg, Helsinki, Stockholm, Budapest and Athens have all been made capital cities out of former small towns, when the industrial civilization and the national movements arrived by the extension of the railway network in the second half or even during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The ambitious policy makers envisaged a large scale cityscape, with clear-cut lines mostly modelled from the Paris of Baron Haussmann and established the basic network of public services with rather optimistic forecasts on the cost for the rest of the country. It was mainly this grandiose town planning praxis, which by 1910 resulted in the development of town planning regulations, the vocabulary of urban design consisting of boulevard, avenue, esplanade, alley, street, square, park, etc, the high technological achievements like the mass transportation systems, subways, elevators and the like. This tradition of grandiosity was continued in Canberra, the federal capital of the Commonwealth of Australia after 1913 onwards, as well as Le Corbusier's Chandigarh or Lucio Costa's Brasilia in the 1950's. This great way of thinking was seemingly missing in 1923, when Ankara, which was situated in the geometrical center of Asia Minor was selected as the capital of the newly born Turkish Republic^. If it is true that architectural and urban design reflects the society, presumably a few of the founding fathers believed in the prosperous future. Ankara already had a population of 75.000, when Hermann Jansen's entry was selected as a winning scheme of the international competition, and it grew to 110.000 by 1932, when his master plan was approved with a target population of only 300.000 by 2000. The chosen low density neighbourhood pattern with detached houses did not envisage the control of growth through establishing an effective commuter transportation system or by the lease of publicly owned land essential to E.Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow. However, it has shown a great concern for the preservation of historical monuments, thus maintaining the Citadel as a major landmark as the Stadtkrone , and with a great recreational and cultural park under it, as may be expected from the Viennese School of Camillo Sitte. The serious underestimation of the growth element - despite some remarkable achievements of the Turkish National Romanticism and the efforts of Clement Holzmeister, Bruno Taut, Paul Bonatz and others in creating an architectural language for the "Palace" functions - made the city more similar to a capital of a -peripheral German province, rather than the capital of the modern Turkish Republic. The cultural and economical links with the German Reich have been firmly established. The 1930's were the time of the world economic depression, so it was a privilege for nearly anyone to be selected by the Turkish Republic to design or to build a capital. The services offered by Le Corbusier - who eagerly studied the great Ottoman architectural heritage of Bursa and Istanbul - were rejected by the Turkish Republic as well as by the Soviet Union. Interestingly enough, having experienced revolutions, both countries had similar official attitudes towards architecture. "Modern Architecture" meant a kind of Neo-Classicism. Cities change continuously. And it is not the war, which ruins cities, but prosperity and peace-time affluence. The population of Ankara doubled every 10 years. By 1955 the target by 2000 was raised to 750.000, but even this figure had been reached by 1969. It was only the Master Plan approved in 1982, which calculated a realistic short term target figure of 3.9 million for 1990. The notorious underestimation of the population growth and also the strength of the "Market" function resulted first in the demolition of the nice detached family houses on both sides of the Atatürk Bulvarı and their replacement with high-rise blocks of flats, commercial office buildings, banks and public institutions. The double alleys on each side of the major boulevard of the Garden City have been cut down, and they have become replaced by asphalted traffic lanes and wide sidewalks jammed with a confusion of vehicles and pedestrians. The acceleration of the "tear-down build-up and sell" process extended the core southward and generally towards the peripheries, where new prestigious public institutions have been located . Besides the sprawl into adjacent rural land, huge squatter areas on publicly owned hillsides characterised the city extension. A booming metropolis swept away the Garden City of Yesterday. Cities have always made great efforts to express their power, to create their image again and again, reflecting the subsequent growth and changes in the power-structure. The cityscapes of pre-industrial Italy made clearly readable the rivalry of powers in a pluralistic society: the palace of the landlord, the church, the municipality, the guildhouse, etc. In the Hungarian capital at the end of nineteenth century the cupolas of the royal palace, the houses of parliament and the St.Stephen Basilica express the balance of the rival powers. In Washington D.C., the capital city designed for the first modern state of the world, the Capitol, which houses the US Congress, around which the whole city structure concentrates, is located on the hill top. On the other hand the White House, the residence of the president, who is the head of the executive power only is down in-the valley. In Ankara the identity-seeking enriched the "Temple" function with two new major landmarks: the Atatürk Mausoleum in which the Neo-Classical Revival reached one of its peaks and the pseudo-Ottoman Kocatepe Camii. Soon after, the erection of the posh tower restaurant became an important issue. Since the price of land made it worthwhile to build upward, the centers of the business activities enriched the silhouette also, while large scale squatting on the surrounding hillsides extended the urban scenery. The unplanned increase of building densities by replacing the small detached houses by high buildings with higher plot-coverage, the public and private development which steered in further distance from the center, as well as the large scale squatting on the surrounding hillside were bound to cause serious transportation problems even in those American cities, where the street network makes up about a third of the total urban land. The narrow streets of the Garden City - which were designed neither for an effective public transportation system, nor for the mass use of the private car - became loaded already far beyond their capacity. The Municipality seems to have deployed all its reserves into the heroic battle the city has to fight twice daily by densifying the road network, improving the traffic junctions continuously, running an effective minibus system, called dolmuş-taksi and employing a well-trained traffic police force in order to prevent a Cairo or Teheran-type collapse of urban transportation. But the authorities are bound to be on the loser's side if the eight volume Ankara Urban Transportation 108 (METU JFA 1988) CHARLES K.POLONYI 4. Both the 'Ankara Urban Transportation Study' (EGO. 1987), and 'Ankara 2015' (Tekeli et a!. 1987), I must stress, clearly identify the problems of a metropolitan capital and are at international standards professionally. On the problems of Ankara, I have to give special reference again to Günay (1988), which is extensively used by students. Figure 7. A remnant from the Early Republican period > f^C^ Figure 8. Early generation of buildings replaced by the "tear-down build -up and sell" process. Study based on the Metropolitan Office Plan for Ankara 2015 prepared by the METU Planning Group cannot be followed up by the quick realisation of the proposed first phase4. It might be too late, even :f decision and availability of resources can be reached today. If the city doubled its population in each decade - in the obvious absence of a conscious development policy, which aims a more favourable distribution of population densities on a national scale - the projected 4.5 million population figure for 2010 of the present Master Plan may still be an underestimation. And it is difficult to imagine twice as many pedestrians and twice as many vehicles on the Atatürk and İsmet İnönü boulevards in the peak hours, as there are today. But due to the spread of private car ownership the situation is bound to be even more impossible. It might well be, that some may attach sentimental values to the squatters of the surrounding hillsides similar to the Garden City idea of the founding fathers. Even their name sounds romantic. The shanty towns are called gecekondu which means built overnight, which is certainly not the case. In fact, many of them have been built by rural communities which, due to the depeasantisation - characteristic of the modernisation of Third World countries - migrate to urban centers where they create large pseudo-villages. They have no chance to meet the requirements of building regulations in order to have a shelter. They take possession of publicly owned unoccupied land without the written consent of the authorities and erect their self-constructed shelters. They are helped by the skills of some semi-professionals from their home towns, producing a kind of folk-architecture while using partly recycled waste materials of the urban civilization. The authorities legalize them later by providing them with both technical and communal infrastructural services like water, electricity, road access, public transportation as well as with schools and mosques. One can fill an album with that semi-spontaneous vernacular architecture, provided that the photographer takes the right angles to his shots with that intention, very similar to Bernard Rudofsky's famous book Architecture without Architects edited in 1964. But in fact, this can be classified as Town Planning without Town Planners, or more correctly as Urban Development without responsible Development Policy, which turned the steep hillsides around the "properly planned" half of the capital, into an extensive zone prone to landslide, erosion and many kinds of other hazards. Now the authorities have to find out, how to reach a kind of collective security against all these risks, how quick evacuation can be made possible in case of disasters, etc. Definite actions have to be taken in the very near future like planting trees and implementing a kind of preservation ordinance. Requirements and processes have to be revised drastically, when Figure 9. Intensive development taking over the previous fabric. IN SUPPORT OF "ANKARA 2015" (METU JFA 1988) 109 living conditions of well exemplified trie population in tmamoğlu Figure 10. The Kızılay junction 6. Most of the concepts and analytical approach used here are not necessarily different from those developed by Balamir (1975), policy is formed for the amelioration or upgrading of the existing gecekondus •and for the more effective use of the skills, initiatives, enterprising and organizing capacities of that clientele group which makes up half of the total urban population, by providing them with plots, basic infrastructures, some building materials and technical advice5. The communities, which contribute to the maintenance, upgrading or to the formation of their neighbourhood with greater efforts should get priorities, when public funds are used to implement infrastructural network. One has to keep in mind also that prevention is always cheaper than the treatment when the case is already aggravated. It is the same community which takes the risk of all consequences, which postpones the actions or the implementation of basic facilities to an "undetermined future". The situation will be made worth by the fact that standards which might be found reasonable today in terms of space, the sanitary system, equipments, institutions or degree of motorisation might not be acceptable in a few years, when a great part of the recently constructed buildings will be turned down and replaced by higher ones with greater plot coverage, as it happened with the properly planned other half of Ankara, and as in fact started already also in several of the hillside shanty towns. The lack of a development policy relevant to the purchasing power of the client groups deteriorated also the properly built housing stock both existing and under construction through the fragmentation of ownership in buildings throughout the country's urban areas. It is quite understandable that it is difficult to play the games of the capitalist society without capital formation, but there are certainly many more ways to use in a more effective way the savings of the individual households and the credits available for building homes.| The conception, financing and realisation of a greater number of affordable dwelling units includes infrastructure as well as complementary equipment in the hand of a profit-oriented developer or of a housing society dealing with non-lucrative projects. They work in a completely different administrative and financial context and the methods they use during the whole process of planning than the little separate ownerships, which minimize the likelihood of decision making and not only embitter the life of those families, which have fallen into the trap of that cheap-looking way to ownership rights, but paralyse large parts of Turkish cities6. Turkey still maintains a population growth three percent per annum. Due to the success of the Green Revolution the growth rate of the food production is higher than that of the population, as generally everywhere in the World, with the exception of Africa and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless the population growth Figures 11-12. Transportation exchange nodes in Kızılay. HO (METU JFA 1988) CHARLES K.POLONYI Figures 13-14. Traffic in Kızılay today: The first phase of the Metro will be installed under Atatürk Bulvarı. Large tracks of publicly owned land along the selected route ofthe Metro may facilitate, instead of obstructing future growth. may create several global environmental problems: the rate of urbanisation obviously exceeds the absorbing capacities of the cities in terms of shelter, education and employment facilities. This may lead to a potentially dangerous demographic distortion and economic pressure, which favours the extensions of extremist political views from the left as well as from the right or from excessive religious fanaticism. The uncontrollable urban growth consumes valuable agricultural potential. The ruthless exploitation of natural resources which is especially alarming in the coastal regions may ruin, for higher foreign exchange earnings, the attraction of these areas during the next ten years, as it happened on the Spanish coasts not long ago. Global environmental problems can be tackled with global strategies only. These have to include all available resources. It might be a dangerous illusion to believe that the strong revival of private investment stimulated not only by the Reagan-Bush administration, the Thatcherist Britain, the prospects of Europe 1992, but also by the reformers of the Eastern Block - parallel with the quasi - total disappearance of public investment may solve all the problems and can provide the still increasing population and the twice as quickly growing urban sector with life-efficient environment. No doubt, private investments on a commercial scale as well as the enterprising and organising capacities even of the poorest strata of the population may alleviate a great part of the load which had to be confronted, but certainly not all. A conscious planning or replanning on national scale and, even state intervention - preferably in the form of well selected, strategically important public investments in the field of infrastructural network - seem to be essential to achieve a more easily manageable population distribution, to protect, restore or readjust natural environment as well as architectural heritage. At least what is still left of the heritage should be safeguarded for the nation's long term interests. At present two parallel trends can be observed, leading in opposite directions. The fragmentation into subregional, municipal or even smaller administrative entities, in which people feel more at home, is accompanied with the formation of greater entities to develop greater markets, greater communities. Neither of these two tendencies can ignore the role of the state. In the case of the Turkish capital it is the Ankara Rapid Transportation System, which has to be pushed into the phase of realisation by the quick and effective intervention of the state. This is "the" strategically most important key project, which should serve the present population and the future growth efficiently and reliably. The city is surrounded by hills that form a horse shoe shaped basin opened for further urban development towards the West. The first phase of the proposed rapid rail transportation system has to be installed under the Atatürk IN SUPPORT OF "ANKARA 2015" (METU JFA 1988) m Figure 15. South-east, fringes of Ankara . Figure 16. South peripheral districts. Figure 17. Altındağ gecekondu settlements, Ulus. Bulvarı, which continues to develop as the principal street and axis of commercial activities in Ankara, concentrating the maximum intensity of the "Market" function and has to be extended westward parallel with the İsmet înönü Bulvarı on the south and with the Istanbul Caddesi on the north, parallel with the two of the major highways of the capital. These two development axes in the Western Corridor supplemented by an effective feeder bus service have to become the major generators of the metropolitan structure. New urban units - embracing the functions of habitat, work and leisure - called urban villages can be developed along these combined road and rail transportation arteries, as "clusters" of a polycentric metropolitan system. The adoption of the urban village concept may satisfy a wide range of aesthetic, economic and social needs. It gives to the residents a kind of self identity, allow citizens to participate in shaping their surroundings, protect and preserve the natural environment, offer recreational, cultural and educational opportunities while they respond to the requirements of the capital on a metropolitan scale. The word "village" does not exclude various building heights, overall mix of densities and land-uses. The effectiveness of the commuter train service and strict specification of criteria, backed by realistic clientele-based development strategies and where possible even with a land-lease system, have to protect the urban villages from loosing their identities, unbalanced growth and high densities. This is necessary not only because both the initial investments and the operation costs are increasing with the size of the settlements, but mainly to prevent "inversion", which causes the serious air pollution and the deterioration of service standards of Ankara. The possible earliest realisation of the rapid rail commuter system, with two parallel systems in the Western Corridor seems to have every right to be considered the most feasible solution for developing a polycentric Metropolitan structure. The proposed alignment fits well into the present "right of ways" and with the exception of the section of the Atatürk Bulvarı can be built in depression, which offers great advantages concerning construction and operation costs. A development strategy which decides on the quick realisation of these two axes only is bound to be more powerful, than the other alternative which continues to discuss the star shaped extension of Ankara in five directions. Although private car based suburban development is obviously possible also along those highways which lead to Ankara through the other three valleys, this would lead to the proliferation of resources. We have to try to make everyone aware of the fact that the time bomb set by the Figures 15-17. The lack of a development policy relevant to the purchasing power of all client groups cause the building of high-rise blocks, while half of the population lives in large scale squatter settlements on the surrounding hillsides. Figures 10-12. 112 (METU JFA 1988) CHARLES K.POLONYI population growth, the increase in private car ownership and environmental decay cannot be rendered harmless by echoing the alarm signal and demonstrating the adaptability of the patterns of the contemporary praxis only. Town development proposals have to be supported by available resources. Neither the Municipality, nor the Government seems to be in a position to finance this strategically most important key project at present. But the government has certainly many more resources than direct funds. I suppose it can create the financial base of the project by its legislative power easily: compared with other cities in Turkey, Ankara has a greater percentage of publicly-owned land. Its status as a national capital has facilitated expropriation of large tracks of land since 1925. As the land ownership maps show, a great amount of the land is assigned to public functions in the direction of the proposed development. Presently the stock of public land formed through expropriations is creating an obstacle for development, rather than facilitating it. Similar legislative measures which could turn private properties into public stock in order to facilitate the realisation of development proposals in the past, now have to find the way of how to convert them into the most positive factor of the metropolitan development. The investment of the community into the infrastructural services can immediately be converted into increased land values by a new zoning regulation adjacent to the stations of the rapid rail transportation system and in the new bus feeding areas. If the rapid transit system under the Atatürk Bulvarı becomes a reality, the parking ground between the entrance of the Gençlik Parkı - which already has become Ankara's equivalent of the Central Park of New York, since the recreational and cultural establishments, which serve the community on regional scale have taken over the site of the Hippodrome - and the Akman Hotel is likely to become the most expensive plot of the capital. It calls for a development on the scale of Time Square. With the "Build-Operate-Transfer" (BOT) or "Build- Own-Operate" model (BOOM) it can easily be realized even parallel with the subway construction. It will certainly help re-energising the Gate of Ulus. Abandoned railway land on the same boulevard and some of the excessive army cantons near the potential'stations may also be used for raising the feasibility of the project. The horse race-course, the railyard and the army cantons have been used in many places of the world as reserve for inner city development. The METU, which was founded with generous donation of land did not only protect it from squatters, but by large scale afforestation turned it into the most valuable fresh air pool of the Metropolitan area. The University's activities may be further amplified by incorporating a techno-park and developing into an even greater metropolitan education and research center, following the examples of the Silicon Valleys in USA or that of the Technopolises in Japan. Other institutions may be developed according to their own specific criteria combining their own resources with various forms of private investments. Legislation can secure that any increase in the value of private land arising from a change in the zoning classification as a result of public investments in the basic infrastructural network along the rapid rail transportation system or in the new bus feeding areas should be returned in the form of tax revenues, even if according to the newly signed Turco-Canadian agreement the Build-Operate-Transfer model was found as the most rational, or at least as the only realistic method for the realisation of the subway system. Otherwise, it will only accelerate the extension of the city with rising land prices and further fragmentation, which without substantial subsidy might not be affordable for the poorer strata of the population. Modern taxation system can boost the private sector on all levels - including the lowest income groups - to take its share in the implementation of the urban village concept, into the effective prevention of formation of new "shanty towns", as well as in responding to city-wide and regional needs. The development and management of a great capital city need an interdisciplinary approach. Threatened by the time bomb of population growth and all its consequences, agreement on the definition of goals and coordination on actions IN SUPPORT OF "ANKARA 2015" (METU JFA 1988) 113 have to be reached without delay in order to achieve a balanced growth and to preserve both natural and man-made resources for the next generation. Please, do not continue the noble tradition of underestimating the growth element again. A conscious urban development policy has to include potential clientele groups of the total population, especially if the poorer half of the society is growing faster than the relatively prosperous one. Indeed, the warnings and the proposals of the "Ankara 2015" have to be taken very seriously.