Gül Tuçaltan

In Turkey, since the 1930s, there have been various legislative actions within the arena of MSW management. However, it is not up till the second half of the 1990s that concrete interventions for the so-called modernization of the MSW management system have taken place within the urban agenda. Since the beginning of the 2000s, a number of sanitary landfills along with integrated waste management facilities have been built to replace the wild dumping areas. Additionally, legal regulations in line with the EU legislation have been introduced. Despite these developments, it is still not possible to indicate to a systematic approach to solid waste management in Turkey. Yet, today, waste management system is still very much identified with the scavengers, who are believed to mainly reside in gecekondu areas. (Gecekondu, meaning “built over night” is the specific naming for the self-built housing that appeared as a contingent phenomenon within Turkish urbanization scene by the beginning of the 1940s. This settlement type emerged as a response to the housing need under the rapid rural to urban migration due to the excess labour power caused by the mechanization of agriculture in the rural areas. Being a form of informal urban sprawl, gecekondu areas have been mostly subject to gradual legitimization by amnesty laws since the 1980s; and rapid urban transformation after the 2000s.)

In the light of the above mentioned case, this project aims to 1) explore the mechanisms lying behind the urbanization of waste and the construction of urban policy and planning responses towards MSW under the context of rapid urbanization in Turkey, with a focus on the specific case of Ankara; 2) to understand how the socio-spatial organization of urban waste is historically produced and transformed; and 3) to produce not only more insightful approaches/solutions but also a more comprehensive theoretical frame to such environmentally, socio-spatially, economically and thus politically important issue.