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Abstract:

Turkey is located on main fault lines and therefore this country has been vulnerable to earthquakes throughout the history. Today, big earthquake is expected to occur in next 20 years. Istanbul is one of the pioneer cities where earthquake risk highest so a lot of urban areas need to be transformed promptly. Millions of housing units are earthquake prone and a great majority of these buildings is planned to demolish and then rebuilt in next 15 years within the scope of urban transformation. Although “Law no. 6306 on Transformation of Areas under Disaster Risk” was enacted in 2012, this law ignores public participation and it reduces urban transformation process to three basic physical construction step: determination of risky areas, evacuation of building and demolition, implementation so it causes some conflicts inherently. Thus, there is a need for developing alternative models for empowering citizens and providing public participation atmosphere so that these areas can be transformed properly by sustaining their cultural, social and natural values. On the other hand, developed countries utilize Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)-based participatory design methods, techniques and tools to empower citizens and provide public participation atmosphere by considering and using their desires, needs, proposals as valuable input in design process. Digital participatory platforms, web and mobile applications, social media are some examples based on ICT and they are developed and customized according to context of project. Thus, these tools and techniques have valuable opportunities for urban transformation process in Turkey. Therefore, this study firstly aims to explore ICT-based participatory design approaches by investigating used tools and techniques in real world cases. Then, it examines these cases according to some parameters, e.g. affordances, challenges, privacy, representativeness, empowerment level etc. These findings are then evaluated and interpreted by considering cultural, social and technological context of Turkey and it is tried to evaluate opportunities provided by ICT-based tools and techniques in order to develop effective participatory design process for urban transformation process in Istanbul.