Abstract:

The disastrous “Marmara Earthquake” in 1999 has cost very many lives, left many others homeless, and destroyed infrastructure and buildings so badly that cities became disfunctioning. Adapazari, as being one of the destroyed cities, has exhibited multi aspects of the damage such as the mistakes in urban planning, architecture, civil engineering, as well as in the planning and control policy.

Following the earthquake, emergency of restoration and reconstruction of the city has made the local authority act immediately to seek for solutions. Being one of the most disastrous earthquakes of the 20th century, Adapazari Earthquake has drawn attention from other countries. Above all, the city of Delft and Adapazari have established a sister city relationship which, afterwards, has led to an intensive research collaboration between Delft University of Technology(TU Delft) and Metropolitan Municipality of Adapazari (Sakarya).

The research, which has been carried by an international team of researchers (including the authors), has focused on the development of urban and architectural master plans through all relevant scales for the future of the city(Adapazari towards 2030). The project has departed from the unique context of Adapazari (culture, geomorphology, built environment, economics, social and politics). The statistically probable earthquake within 30 years periods is taken into account as one of the major constraints; though, not the only one.

The aim of this collaborative research is not to produce one definitive plan and leave; instead, educating and training the Adapazari team (planners and architects) within this process to provide self-standing experts, so that they would go on with the other phases of the project, in the future. To realize this intention, a cross education and training is started within the research program.

The experience has yield very fruitful results not only for the destroyed city (Adapazari), but we also have learnt a lot of great lessons, there from. These lessons thorough this process were basically from similarities and differences (regarding approaches) within the domains of planning and design, besides the experiential fact that people get collaborative and helpful during disasters.

We believe design is one of the most context sensitive domains. Every design and planning problem requires a deep context analysis, which will lead to a unique instantial solution, though typological issues are preserved. This paper will clarify this matter through our approach to objective, subjective and inter-subjective experience in terms of epistemology, creativity and methods.

This international experience has thought us that the two different teams, which are (superficially) supposed to have little in common in designing and planning approaches; can collaborate in problem solving in spite of the different cultural backgrounds of the actors, their limits in the techniques and bureaucratic mechanisms.

Keywords:

Adapazari Earthquake, planning, design, epistemology, objectivity, subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, method, education, training.