New Strategies for Urban Development after Covid-19

Abstract

Covid-19 crises created a drastic confrontation with the insufficiency of our immediate living and urban environment in sustaining our basic needs. Living through the lockdown experience we realized that accessibility to fresh air, sunlight, natural resources, food and social networks even in a limited sense are the basics for a healthy living. Now in the aftermath of crises, urban professionals are in quest of developing new strategies for urban development that could accommodate these basics. Living Covid-19 experience in Mardin, a city in the Southeast Turkey, consisting of both modern and traditional urban areas, we witnessed the efficiency of the old/traditional settlement which has also been hosting the disadvantaged groups, vis-a-vis the ineffectiveness of the new settlement in dealing with crises. The processes of city-making have been operating almost in the same way through the dynamics of neoliberal economies creating an ‘international urbanization style’ which ignores urban diversities created by the local dynamics. In this sense, documenting the daily experience of people living in traditional and new urban areas during the first lockdowns, this piece of work aims to present what could be learned from the operative and nonoperative spatial, socio-cultural and economic features of our cities in order to be transferred as strategies to the new ‘normal’. The research is designed in a qualitative phenomenological research method. In order to obtain data, in-depth interviews with 10 families living and/or working in the old and/or the new settlement were conducted. Questions vary to reveal changing spatial and socio-cultural and economic patterns of living before, during and after the pandemic and accessibility to immediate urban environment and natural resources. Through the collection of this data, we are able to present strategies learnt from traditional urban environments that could be transferred to the new urban design attempts. This project is supported by Mardin Artuklu University Scientific Research Projects Division.