Turkey’s Disaster Management
Good Fit
- Readers wanting to understand the social, political, and legal foundations of Turkey's disaster management system
- Anyone wanting an academic-level understanding of the link between urbanization and disaster risk
- Researchers wanting multidisciplinary perspectives (sociology, economics, law, geography) in one volume
- Readers wanting to understand the constitutional/legal division of responsibility between central and local government
Not a Fit
- Readers looking for an account of one specific earthquake (e.g., only the 1999 Marmara quake) — the book focuses on institutional/theoretical frameworks
- Readers seeking a practical disaster-preparedness guide (e.g., how to build a home emergency kit)
- Readers who want a single consistent authorial voice rather than a 19-chapter, multi-author academic format
The Foreword opens with global statistics — according to the EM-DAT database, 1,017,223 people died in natural disasters worldwide between 1996 and 2015; Turkey contributed heavily to that toll through the 17 August and 12 November 1999 Marmara earthquakes and the 2011 Van earthquakes.
The editors introduce the book's structure — earthquakes, meteorological disasters, the link between urbanization and disaster, disaster law, the psychological/sociological dimension, economics and insurance, the role of civil society organizations, a gender perspective, EU and UN approaches, and case studies from Cyprus, Van, and Istanbul.
In Chapter 1, noted urban studies professor Ruşen Keleş charts Turkey's rapid urbanization since World War II in figures — the urban population share rose from under 20% in the 1950s, to 60% in the 1970s, 80% by 2010, and 93% today.
Keleş grounds the concept of "urban policy" in official definitions from the Turkish Academy of Sciences' Dictionary of Scientific Terms, quoting the formal definitions of "disaster" and "natural disaster."
The chapter then turns to Article 126 of the Constitution to explain the division of responsibility between the central government and local authorities, noting Turkey's membership in the European Charter of Local Self-Government.
This opening chapter demonstrates the book's method: legal and institutional frameworks are consistently grounded in concrete figures and official definitions, rather than remaining purely theoretical.
- The multi-author structure (20+ contributors from various universities and institutions like AFAD and AKUT) brings together institutional and academic perspectives
- Each chapter offers depth suited to its author's own academic specialty — Keleş's urban-studies focus is one example
- Official statistics and legal citations (constitutional articles, EM-DAT data) provide academic rigor
A similar academic approach to Turkey's disaster geography
An international academic work on the social/political dimension of disaster management
The book goes on to examine Turkey's earthquake potential (Chapters 2–3), meteorological disasters and risk management (Chapter 4), disaster-sensitive urban planning (Chapter 5), and the institutional structure of disaster law (Chapter 6).
The second section is devoted to the sociological, psychological, and economic dimensions of disaster (Chapters 7–10: social vulnerability, psychosocial effects, insurance, gender perspectives, the role of NGOs); the third section examines UN and EU disaster policy, and the final section analyzes concrete case studies from Istanbul, Van, and Northern Cyprus.
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