'An era of multiple disasters': How concrete and construction caused Istanbul to flood

Gulshah Aktan feels lucky to be alive after flood waters trapped her in a bus for four and a half hours. Grey water swirled around her legs before locals in the Ayazaga district of northern Istanbul were able to pull her and other passengers to safety.

“We thought we were going to die,” Ms Aktan, 28, told The National.

She and her aunt Dilek survived, but the family’s electrical goods repair shop was not so lucky. Dirty brown floodwaters soaked the entire shop, ruining 40 computers, and other stock and equipment worth an estimated 5 million Turkish liras to 6 million Turkish liras ($100,595 to $120,715).

“We cried, and we cleaned up,” said Ms Aktan, dressed in black leggings and a cream jumper spattered with muddy water. The toil is not over: family members use brooms to push brown watery mud left by the receding flood waters into the street outside.

The family cat Pekize, who survived the flood waters by perching on a desk, eats kibble from a bowl on the floor of the shop, emptied of everything the family needed to keep their business running. Even when they are able to reopen, they will have nothing to sell, and their customers’ machines in for fixing have been ruined too.

Show caption: Gulshah Aktan, 28, shows how flood water rose to shoulder he…

Istanbul is now reckoning with the aftermath of flooding caused by the heaviest rain since records began over 80 years ago. Eight people were killed, including one person who was electrocuted and others who were swept away by the meters-high flood water.

The floods ring alarm bells. A mega city of 16 million people, Istanbul has expanded rapidly, with luxury high-rise tower blocks, car parks, roads and shopping malls sprouting into a concrete jungle over where natural waterways once ran. Green space has given way to blocks of glass and cement. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has built a reputation for developing impressive, enormous-scale infrastructure projects, such as airports, road systems and bridges.

Like many other nations around the world grappling with the effects of climate change, authorities have made ambitions pledges and targets. Ankara is aiming for Turkey’s greenhouse gas emissions to peak by 2038 at the latest, followed by a steady decline to reach net zero by 2053.

Show caption: Cat Pekize eats food on a floor dirtied by receding flood wa…

The country is next month hosting the Cop31 climate conference, and will welcome heads of state and policymakers from around the world to tackle the crippling fallout of a heating planet.

But closer to home, decision makers need to reconsider their approaches if the catastrophic effects of weather extremes are to be contained, experts said.

Given Istanbul’s exposure to drought and earthquakes as well as floods, development has taken place without sufficient attention given to the shifting power of nature, according to urban planners and a climate scientist interviewed by The National.

Show caption: Diggers clear damaged earth next to the Ayazaga Creek after …

Destruction like that caused by the floods has become "inevitable", as central and local administrators have rejected "public-interest planning" and "set aside scientific reality", Akif Atlar, president of the Turkish Chamber of City Planners, told The National.

"What we refer to as ‘development’ can, in fact, be regarded as a disaster due to the impact of man-made structures," Dr Baran Bozoglu, President of the Climate Change Policy and Research Association, told The National.

And while more research is needed to know if a single weather event like a torrential downpour is a direct result of climate change, increasingly extreme weather patterns caused by a heating planet are a new normal that Turkey needs to adapt to, the experts said.

“This is not pessimism; it is realism grounded in data,” Levent Kurnaz, a climate scientist at Istanbul’s Bogazici Centre for Climate Change Studies, told The National.

‘Unsurvivable’ economy made worse

Tucked south of hills and forests that stretch away to the Black Sea coastline, Ayazaga is a tangle of cement buildings and roads sitting alongside the Ayazaga Creek, which burst its banks last week.

A sports pitch alongside the waterway was completely flooded and diggers now remove piles of twisted metal and football goal posts from the ground, covered in churned mud.

While new skyscrapers tower above other buildings, the cement apartment blocks that make up much of Ayazaga are home to working-class Turks who migrated from other parts of the country.

Show caption: Vehicles damaged by the flood in the Ayazaga district of Ist…

Many had already been struggling financially, battling inflation of more than 30 per cent and a years-long squeeze on quality of life. Across Turkey, trade unions estimate that the monthly cost of living for one person is now one and a half times the minimum wage of 33,000 liras. A family of four needs to be bringing in nearly four times the minimum wage just to stay out of poverty, the unions say.

Yacoub Cotoglu, 37, has dark circles under his eyes, having not slept for four nights since the floods. Down a tight alleyway, he had a stock room for his clothing and shoe shop, but it has now been gutted by the floodwaters. A friend tries to hose down men’s slippers to salvage them.

“Seventy five per cent of my stock is gone,” Mr Cotoglu told The National. “It’s at least 3 million liras worth of damage.”

Show caption: Ceramics worker Muzaffer cleans his stock room. Lizzie Porte…

His neighbour Muzaffer, a 65-year-old ceramics worker, pulls a bag on to an enormous pile of filthy doors, metal bars and other household items ruined by the flood waters.

“It’s all rubbish,” he said. The already “unsurvivable” financial situation has been “made even worse” by the floods, he added.

Many small business owners in Ayazaga do not have insurance policies to bail them out. Gulshah Aktan’s family is now relying on promised government compensation handouts that have yet to materialise.

At their electrical repair shop, she was dismayed by the attitude of officials who had visited in recent days to take a damage assessment. “They didn’t come inside - they said, ‘my suit is not suitable for going in,’” Gulshah said.

Across Istanbul, the flood damage so far is estimated at $400 million, only 10 per cent of which will be covered by insurance companies, the Haberturk news outlet reported.

Istanbul governor Davut Gul said this week that 3,000 homes and businesses suffered “significant damage” and promised compensation payouts. More than 5,000 people whose property was less severely impacted have already received payments of 10,000 Turkish liras, he said.

Show caption: Kebab shop owner Omer Payamzade has not been able to pay his…

Down the street, kebab and flatbread takeaway restaurant owner Omer Payamzade, 49, is also still waiting.

Officials have also taken damage assessments, but no compensation has been paid out yet, said Mr Payamzade, originally from Gaziantep in south-eastern Turkey.

“They came, they saw, they had a look, then they left,” he said.

He is aware that the effect of the flood goes further than his own losses. His business employed 12 people in total, but he has not been able to pay them since the flood.

“People worked so hard here to earn money for their families,” he said. “Now they’re the victims as well as us.”

Over-construction

Why was Ayazaga hit so badly? Like in other areas of Istanbul that were also heavily flooded, the reasons are several. Huge development in areas in the higher watershed - the highest elevation zone of a drainage basin - means that more water stays on the ground’s surface and runs down to lower areas like Ayazaga. But construction of offices, residential projects and multistory underground parking garages on the valley floor meant there was nowhere for the water to go there either.

The goal should be the exact opposite, according to Dr Seher Yucel, a landscape architect and a faculty member in the urban and regional planning department at Istanbul’s Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.

“Water in the upper watershed should be allowed to seep into the soil as much as possible,” she told The National. “In the valley floor, construction should not be permitted within floodplain boundaries, and these areas should be converted into public spaces that can accommodate water during floods and serve as parks and recreational areas during dry periods.”

The level of construction in Istanbul is clear to see. Next to forests, motorways snake between high-rise apartment complexes; shopping malls stand like space ships between tight rows of buildings. The numbers back up the scene: according to an academic study published in 2024, settled areas in Istanbul province increased from 6 percent of overall land cover in 1984 to 24 percent in 2022. Agricultural areas halved in size from 36 percent to 17 percent.

Authorities and developers in Istanbul have for too long prioritised construction over respecting natural water courses, even when fully legal and planned, the experts said.

“The fact that flooding occurred not only in areas of illegal or unplanned development but also in projects that had been approved by the zoning plan and obtained permits indicates that the problem lies not merely in a lack of planning but in the very approach to nature inherent in the planning process,” Ms Yucel said. Too often, anywhere outside of a dedicated nature reserve or a protected area was treated as a “vacant lot”, she added.

Others blame a long history of city planning that has failed to respect Istanbul’s hydrology. Mr Atlar referenced research findings that 108 of 164 stream channels in the city have been disrupted by urban development geared towards profit.

“In a planning practice that rejects a public-interest and scientific approach, areas that should be accessible to the general public are opened up to luxury housing projects, covered with shopping malls, and filled with office towers — all to enrich certain segments of society,” he said.

The problems are structural and include "misguided urban planning" and developments that spring up first, and only then are water supply systems and rainwater harvesting facilities constructed, said Mr Bozoglu, who is a former head of Turkey's chamber of environmental engineers. Rainwater resistance capacity estimates on old buildings are out of date due to more extreme weather patterns involving intense rainfall, and developers need to plan using new precipitation estimates. "This issue needs to be resolved at its root," he said.

'An era of multiple disasters'

With rapid development having already changed the way rain falls in Istanbul so much, authorities need to act to prevent further disaster, the experts said. More areas need to be able to absorb water. Waterways need to be protected. Natural floodplains need to be transformed into areas that make room for water during floods and serve as public spaces during dry periods, especially as weather patterns become more extreme.

"Riverbeds must be cleared as much as possible, with buildings in these areas removed, whilst ensuring residents’ rights are protected, and an urban regeneration programme must be carried out," Mr Bozoglu said.

The state meteorological service said last month that a third of Turkey’s extreme weather events in the first eight months of the year were heavy rainfall and flooding, but the country also experienced storms and landslides, and higher than average winter and summer temperatures. The overall number of extreme weather events was the third highest since records began in 1941.

A dedicated study was necessary to determine the link between this month's rainfall and the climate crisis, but experts expect more extreme weather events to come, and climate change makes flooding more likely and more severe.

Science tells us that “the dice have become loaded — even if we cannot identify which specific roll was influenced by that bias", Mr Kurnaz said.

High volumes of rainfall on fewer days increase the risk of both flooding and drought, because soil - especially when built over - lacks the time to absorb such sudden influxes of water and runs over the surface instead of replenishing groundwater reserves.

“We must tailor our preparations to address this dual-natured risk,” Mr Kurnaz added.

Officials do acknowledge the need to adapt to more extreme weather patterns, and to engineering and rainwater storage estimations in line with them.

“We cannot plan the future with past data; this is now crystal clear,” Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change Minister Murat Kurum told journalists. Cleaning riverbeds, regular maintenance of river rehabilitation works, strengthening rainwater drainage systems, and reassessing flood risks are now “responsibilities that cannot be postponed,” he added. Turkey’s Ministry for Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change and the Istanbul Governorship did not respond to detailed questions asking for further comment.

Some initiatives may cause more harm than good if not done properly, Ms Yucel said. “Rehabilitation” of streams that have been built over and around risks allowing water to flow much faster at ground surface level, rather than allowing the sort of percolation that helps reduce flood risk. “The risk of flooding is not eliminated — it is simply shifted to the lower reaches of the watershed,” Ms Yucel said.

And buzz-wordy concepts such as “rain gardens” - shallow, planted depression designed to capture stormwater runoff - and “sponge cities” - the use of permeable surfaces to absorb, store, filter and reuse stormwater - can be valuable, but are not solutions in and of themselves, she added.

Rainwater needs to be seen as a resource, Mr Kurnaz said, and can be collected to mitigate flooding and provide water supplies during dry periods. Early warning systems must also alert the public ahead of extreme weather.

“The common thread among these measures is that they must be implemented before a flood occurs, not after,” he said. “Investing in these solutions beforehand is not only more cost-effective than dealing with the aftermath of a disaster, but it also saves more lives.”

Istanbul also lies in an active earthquake zone and has for years been expecting a strong quake of more than seven in magnitude. Despite long-standing “urban redevelopment” projects, much of the city’s housing stock remains weak and unfit to withstand a strong quake.

Instead of “controversial large-scale infrastructure projects", authorities need to allocate as much budget as possible for renovation plans that ensure homes, businesses, infrastructure and city layouts are flood proof, as well as earthquake proof, urban planner Mr Atlar said.

“We now live in an era of multiple disasters,” he added.

Back in Ayazaga, the idea of planning for the long term is hard to imagine for residents still reeling from the floods. The losses are financial, but also physical and mental.

Omer Payamzade, the kebab shop owner, said the floodwaters came up to torso height.

“We’ve lost everything,” he said.