When the Republic of Turkey was founded in the 1920s, approximately 25% of the total population lived in urban areas which amounted to 3.3 million inhabitants. In 1950 this figured reached 5.2 million, still constituting 25% of total population. After the 1950s, fast growth of population and migration to urban areas enforced the society to revise its urban development legislation and establish the city and regional planning education to raise planners to cope with exacerbating space problems.
Turkey's population in 2016 has increased to 78.7 million inhabitants, 92% of which are living in provincial and district centres. Only administrative measures and architectural approaches cannot cope with the emerging spatial problems. Hence city and regional planning education was first instigated in the Middle East Technical University and today, the number of the city and regional planning schools has risen to 22, each developing their own approach to ever increasing spatial problems.
Being aware of the importance of regional development, settlement systems, urban growth and urban transformation processes, TEDU has established the City and Regional Planning Department under the Faculty of Architecture. The department considers planning as the art of intervening with the spatial structures of both the cities and regions. To accomplish this task, the understanding of economic, social, political and administrative evolutions is vital. As seen, city and region cover a wide variety of topics. City and regional, in short, spatial planners should have the capacity to command and cope with immense problems.
Perceiving this fact, TEDU Department of City and Regional Planning, in the long run:
- Aims to educate students in the more specific fields of social, engineering and design fields,
- Transfer knowledge to the students not so much for its intrinsic value, but mostly in order to solve problems arising in practical and theoretical activities,
- Develop students' capacities of reasoning procedures so that they not only acquire knowledge but also learn to think will constitute the basis education.
Hence, throughout the lecture and studio works:
- The students are asked to freely participate in all discussions, ask questions, and comment on what has been said by the instructors.
- They are encouraged to concentrate on keywords, graphic presentation and algorithmic thinking, rather than leaning on lecture notes as told by the instructors.
- They should prefer to develop their reasoning capabilities instead of filling their minds with knowledge that has become very easily accessed thanks to information technologies.
Prof.Dr. Baykan Günay
Chair, TEDU Department of City and Regional Planning