Zoning and Laws

Within the time slice extending from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey, administrative renewal and socio-economic change began with the Tanzimat Period, and relatively comprehensive spatial planning and related legislation at the urban scale were also developed for the first time during this period. In this book, all Ottoman period construction legislation is presented to readers for the first time in contemporary Turkish.

The Municipal Building and Roads Law, the first law enacted regarding construction and urban planning in the Republican period, came into force in the 1930s, a period when the new Republic was crowned and its past ties with the Ottoman period were severed, and new legal and institutional structures of modern Turkey in every sense were realized. Our first construction law, numbered 6785 and titled "construction," and the additions made to this law with regulation numbered 1605, are extremely important legal documents in terms of demonstrating the rapid development achieved by the young Republic in spatial planning.

This study aims to compile the construction dimension of our urban planning history; by gathering the main documents of the relevant legislation, the conditions that shaped this legislation, the stages it went through, and the criticisms and evaluations it faced. It should be noted that a healthy evaluation of current developments related to construction can only be made by having knowledge of such a background. This book will be a work to be used to fill this gap.