- The understanding of Beijing cultural spaces   882 kb by    Zongpei, Gu | bessiegu@qq.com    Short Outline Protecting and re-using cultural spaces is one of the most important issues during Beijing’s development. A comprehensive understanding of the present situation of cultural spaces in Beijing is examined by mapping the spatial distribution of Beijing’s cultural resources. More importantly, downfalls behind the current situation in Beijing are analyzed. Abstract Urban renewal is among the priorities of urban agenda in Istanbul considering the large amount of squatter areas, disaster-vulnarable existing building stock, and historic building stock. Eventhough urban renewal is not a new phenomenon in Turkey, 1999 Marmara Earthquakes have played a major role in changing the emphasis from quantity to quality as a way to resolve the urbanisation perception by focusing on what already exists. New laws and regulations, new planning tools and methodologies and new organisation forms have followed the earthquakes. The private sector has valorised this process through the large-scale property-led renewal schemes in the creation of gated housing estates and in the transformation of squatter areas and historic inner-city neighbourhoods into the giant construction zones of economic rant and land speculation. Infact, the paper claims that the large-scale property-led renewal schemes, which have been employed as an evolving model in resolving the urbanisation problem, are turned into the instruments of “urbicide” in Istanbul as a political “evolving” model of urban destruction. The concerns arising out of this change of emphasis encompass conflicts between theory and practice, as well as conflicts between production and consumption, marketing and planning, authenticity and diversity, users and owners, process and action, and opportunities and threats. Within this scope, by constructing an urban renewal framework through the exploration of Law on the Protection and the Revitalisation of Deteriorated Historical and Cultural Immovable Assets (2005) and Law on the Transformation of Areas under Disaster Risk (2012), the paper intents to discuss the evolving and declining urbanisation patterns in Istanbul by relating them with up-to-date political, economic, technological and socio- economic inferences. Considerable emphasis is placed on the use of examples in Historic Peninsula to illustrate and critically analyze meanings, inputs, outputs and impacts. The paper concludes by addressing in what ways the planning as a profession can manage these evolving and declining models in resolving contradictions stemming from the dichotomy of urbanisation and urbicide in Istanbul. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper