- Misuse of urban Regeneration Projects as a disintegrative Tool: Two Case Studies from Ankara   249 kb by    Kaplan, Hulagu & Tunçer, Mehmet | hukaplan@gmail.com    Short Outline Ankara suffers both from environmental degradation, and misuse of planning tools by local governments. In this paper ,two case studies of regeneration projects are evaluated for their socio-economic implications and ecological impacts. Abstract Issues related to ecologically oriented urban development and management are an increasing concern in urban planning Urban ecology implies that environmental problems be solved within the built environment to a degree where the products and energy systems of built environmental processes are passed on to the larger environment as benefits,not as hazards to nature. When working within the concept of urban ecology the responsibility of planners and designers is to work as ecologically sensible as possible within the given economical,social and cultural conditions. Ecological conditions in Turkish cities are worsening and require beter protection of the environmental ingredients. This requirement implies a coordinated approach dealing with all urban activities and their socio-economical and ecological consequences in an urban context.Local governments,with their planning powers have the opportunity to coordinate the planning and development efforts towards ecologically sound urban restructuring through urban regeneration projects . Urban regeneration projects are fairly a new urban developmental tool in the hands of Turkish local governments. Ankara Greater Municipality is one of such local governments with several regeneration projects. Changing cities towards sustainability, in a more ecological direction requires more than focusing on rehabilitation and/or redevelopment.To this end,integrating ecological elements in urban regeneration projects should be considered as a vital component of these projects. Hence, a successful regeneration process based on ecological principles would therefore involve both new forms of technology such as eco-tech, new forms of public regulation as well as new forms of organising urban management to bring together all stakeholders,from local government ton on-governmental organisations.Meanwhile,urban regeneration projects are primarily seen by the majority of local governments as tools of economic development,to the extent to redevelop or ‘gentrify’ a given urban land. In Ankara,Dikmen Valley Residential and Environmental Development Project and Portakal Cicegi Valley Urban Regeneration Project are the first two projects of this kind. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the socio-economic and ecological impacts of these projects by a two-tiered evaluation method and derive reccomendations for urban planners and local governments , to use in the preperation of sustainability oriented urban strategies. Keywords Ankara,regeneration project, socio-economic impact,ecological impact,gentrification. Keywords Ankara,urban regeneration projects,socio-economic and ecological impacts,gentrification Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2006: Cities between Integration and Disintegration   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper