Unconditional authorization: Insights from the 2018 Development Amnesty in Türkiye

Abstract

Unauthorized housing is a phenomenon exceeding the limits of income, location, and specific groups of households with varying motivations, from the housing needs of households to personal advantages such as extra income and housing wealth. Türkiye is among the countries experiencing enormous levels of unauthorized housing activities and authorization attempts. As recently observed, a development amnesty to manage these units via an uncontrolled, self-declared, and paid authorization process has received more than 10 million applications. However, the location and extent of these applications have yet to be declared, though they matter in both urban planning and housing markets. This study delves into the possible locations of unauthorized housing in Türkiye concerning main land-use cover characteristics. For this purpose, this study fields a question to reveal the driving factors of unauthorized housing and the spatial reflections of the relationships between land use and changes in them. In this study, more than 700 thousand phone calls to the support center of the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change have been utilized during the years selected, and data concerning land-use cover in Türkiye were examined at the district level. Geographically weighted regression and multiscale geographically weighted regression models were applied to investigate the spatial heterogeneity of the (change in) land-use cover on unauthorization. The results reveal that some types of land-use cover are significant and showed variegated trends. Moreover, the accumulation of unauthorized housing has been revealed in some metropolitan cities, including earthquake-prone areas and natural protection zones.