The consequences of security cognition in post-disaster urban planning practices in the case of Turkey

This paper synthesis the literature on risk and disaster paradigms and evaluates the disaster management system of Turkey by presenting the post-disaster urban planning practices. The threat of nature on human being and their artefacts establishes risk cognition and becomes one of the main concerns of societies due to the social and economic costs. The change in the perception of risk has led to revise the disaster management paradigms at international level in 1990s. The traditional disaster paradigms see the physical world as an externality causing damage on human environment, thus the aim of this thought is to reduce losses caused by disasters. Seeing the shortcomings of traditional approaches, the changing conceptualization of disasters concludes to contemporary approaches, which assume that pre-disaster policies lead to rationalization of resource allocation and increase efficiency of investments made to reduce risks. However, a disaster management system dominated by traditional view, which focuses on direct impacts of disasters and ignores the secondary effects, leads to employment of resources in an irregular way without predicting possible consequences. In the disaster management approach of Turkey, the security concern of the traditional approach produces permanent housing in geologically safer districts, which causes the problem of fragmentation of urban space. Adapazari and Van, earthquake-hit cities of Turkey, exemplify the post-disaster urban setting of a traditional disaster management approach. Along with the literature, post-disaster practices of Turkey reveal that the security concern result in generation of new settlement districts posing new problems such as fragmentation of urban bodies, alienation of new settlements from historicity of existing town and isolation of urban public culture. © 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht