Planning for the Shrinking Mining City: Zonguldak

So we have had a one-month journey for exploring and understanding Zonguldak. Students well documented the dynamics of this city and clearly documented that since the late 1990s the city has been experiencing a process of deindustrialisation and shrinkage. 

Over the last few decades the phenomenon of urban shrinkage, referring to a process of population loss in a densely populated urban area, has received increasing attention in the literature. While the causes of urban shrinkage is well documented, recently planning for shrinking cities have attracted the interest of urban planners. Current research agrees that planning for shrinkage requires a different focus than planning for growing cities. The situation seems to be more complicated for shrinking mining cities for which problems related with shrinking might be worse related with the specificities of mining industry.

Within this framework the 2013-2014 Planning and Design Studios aimed to practice a process of planning for the shrinking mining city of Zonguldak. In CP 301 Planning and Design studio, undertaken in the fall term, students had been introduced with planning issues in the shrinking mining city of Zonguldak and other settlements in the Zonguldak Province. They had elaborated on alternative scenarios that would affect the future of Zonguldak and ended the term by identifying visions for Zonguldak as well as strategies that comply with their visions. In the spring term, the CP 302 Planning and Design Studio aimed to take this last step further by elaborating on planning strategies at the urban level. Predicating on the recent calls for a move from regional to local strategies at the implementation level in shrinking cities, the CP 302 Planning and Design studio undertaken in the spring term aimed to move from the regional strategies developed in the fall term to the local and the implementation level.

The Zonguldak team designed a portfolio of these works, which may be followed @

http://issuu.com/iytecity/docs/iytestudioscp301-302-zonguldak

We hope you enjoy!