Ankara

The Turkish cooperative is a construction vehicle, not a landlord. A yapı kooperatifi (building cooperative) is formed by a group of households under the Cooperatives Law of 1969. It buys or is allocated land, collects instalments from its members, builds, hands over the flats and then winds itself up. Members hold a share in the cooperative while it exists. When it dissolves they hold kat mülkiyeti (condominium freehold) in an ordinary block. There is no continuing equity ring-fence, no limited-equity resale formula and no permanent rental tier. Everything the model achieves, it achieves during construction.

The movement grew out of the same pressure that produced the gecekondu. Municipalities could not build fast enough, the state would not, and households organised to do it themselves with legal title instead of without it. The result was enormous before it thinned out. Cooperative Housing International’s profile of the Turkish sector counts nearly 70,000 housing cooperatives registered in Türkiye between 1935 and 2002. In 1988 alone they completed 167,514 units, 35% of all building permits issued that year. Between 1979 and 2011 cooperatives accounted for 1,601,289 permitted dwellings, and as late as 2011 there were still 54,996 of them carrying 1,985,076 members. Ankara was the centre of gravity for all of it, because Ankara was where the land and the municipal will happened to coincide.

From our library

Housing cooperatives in Türkiye

Turkey’s housing co‑ops surged to 167 k units in 1988, then plummeted after 2002 policy shifts.

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What survives clusters into three kinds, and they do not share a problem. The legacy unions still hold land, records and members: Kent-Koop in Ankara coordinates around 600 cooperatives across 37 projects, with sites at Balıkuyumcu, Bağlum, Dikilitaş and Çamlıdere. Above them sit the national central unions TÜRKKENT and TÜRKKONUT and some 383 local unions. A second group is dormant: shell cooperatives kept alive on paper for land they can no longer finance. The third is new and small, a policy-advocacy wave arguing the model back into relevance from outside government. Their problems differ. The legacy unions have land and no finance; the dormant ones have title and no members; the advocates have arguments and neither.

Building cooperatives are supervised by the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change, the national ministry responsible for planning, building standards and climate policy. That places them under the same roof as the urban-transformation programme that displaced them, and it is about the extent of the relationship. Where cooperatives sit in current housing policy is easy to state: nowhere. The programme now under way is state-built and state-sold, with no cooperative channel in it.

In October 2025 the government opened the Yüzyılın Konut Projesi (the Century’s Housing Project), the largest state housing push in the Republic’s history. TOKİ promises 500,000 units across all 81 provinces, with 100,000 in Istanbul. Appetite outran supply everywhere. Nationally 5,242,000 valid applications chased the half-million homes. Ankara alone filed 287,094, second only to Istanbul. The capital’s lottery, by then covering 31,037 homes, was drawn before a notary on 3 March 2026. Roughly nine applicants stood behind every flat. The first 1+1 and 2+1 homes are promised for March 2027. One element is genuinely new. TOKİ will let 15,000 flats in Istanbul at half the local going rent on three-year contracts. It is the first standing public rental tier the country has attempted at scale. Ankara gets none of it.

Three tiers of government each hold part of the answer, and the fault line between them is partisan. National government sets subsidy, owns TOKİ and writes tenancy law, which is where the renewal ceiling comes from. The Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change signs off urban-transformation boundaries. The Ankara Büyükşehir Belediyesi, run by Mansur Yavaş of the opposition CHP since 2019, holds municipal land and that pipeline of its own. The friction between the levels is not theoretical. The municipality’s largest scheme, 39,000 homes at Gölbaşı Hallaçlı, had already waited a year for ministry approval of its transformation boundary when it was unveiled. Delivery in Ankara depends on two administrations that disagree about most other things.

For cooperatives there is no instrument to name. Türkiye has no Konzeptverfahren-style concept-led land tender, where public land goes to the best proposal rather than the highest bid. It has no Erbbaurecht-style ground lease that keeps the land itself in public hands. Municipal land in Ankara is developed by the municipality or sold. State land is developed by TOKİ. A cooperative that wants to build in the capital today bids for land at market price with no subsidised finance behind it. That, more than any loss of appetite, is what ended the model.

On empty buildings the reply has been demolition rather than reuse. Law 6306 of 2012, on the regeneration of areas under disaster risk, is the main urban instrument, and it works by clearing and rebuilding. It carries no vacancy trigger of any kind. The country’s one great adaptive-reuse argument is being had in the courts instead. Saraçoğlu Mahallesi, the Republic’s first mass-housing scheme, was designed by the German architect Paul Bonatz and finished in 1946. It holds 75 low-rise blocks, 642 flats and a further 435 staff units, shaded by registered trees, a short walk from Kızılay. The Ankara branch of the Chamber of Architects has fought its restoration for years. Its chair, Tezcan Karakuş Candan, called the neighbourhood “the apple of our eye” and asked the conservation board to stop the works.

Organisation in focus

Mimarlar Odası Ankara Şubesi (Chamber of Architects, Ankara Branch)

Advocates planning, conservation, and housing‑policy debate in Ankara's architecture sector.

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Sustainability arrives here through the building code rather than through housing policy. Türkiye’s revised Energy Performance of Buildings Regulation took effect on 1 January 2023. New buildings above 5,000 m² had to be near-zero-energy. The threshold fell to 2,000 m² on 1 January 2025, minimum energy class rose to B, and the on-site renewable share went from 5% to 10%. Above the code sits a net-zero target for 2053, announced in 2021 and restated in the long-term climate strategy. Neither instrument says anything about who owns the building. Yet new state-built and cooperative stock are the only places where a standard can be set at scale. Everywhere else it is negotiated block by block. That is the quiet argument for a non-market tier, and nobody in Ankara is currently making it.

Batıkent is the reason Ankara belongs in any European conversation about cooperative housing. From 1979 the municipality, the central government and Kent-Koop, a union of housing cooperatives, built a new town west of the city on 1,035 hectares. Roughly 70,000 homes went up for about 250,000 people, organised through 275 separate cooperatives. It took the World Habitat Award in 1986, when the citation counted 50,000 completed units. The award was for showing that a new town could be built quickly, on the self-help effort of the people who would live in it.

Lighthouse project

Batıkent Project

70,000 homes for 250,000 residents on 1,035 ha, built by municipality, government, Kent‑Koop.

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Organisation in focus

Kent-Koop

Coordinates Ankara housing cooperatives, promoting Batıkent new town development across projects nationwide.

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Kent-Koop did not stop there. It describes its own trajectory as a move from housing cooperativism to urban cooperativism. That is a precise claim rather than a slogan. The ambition is to produce a district, with its schools, workshops and transport, instead of a block. The union kept its registers, its staff and its land through four decades of collapsing production. That institutional survival is the most underrated asset in Ankara’s housing system.

Dikmen Vadisi was Türkiye’s first urban-transformation project, begun in 1989 under Mayor Murat Karayalçın, who had run Kent-Koop before he ran the city. It cleared gecekondu from a valley running into central Ankara and rehoused the same families in flats set among parks and public buildings. It is also the cautionary tale. The municipality’s own project page records that rights-holders in the final stage have now been waiting 17 years for the homes they were promised.

Eserkent in Mamak is the smallest thing named here and among the most instructive. The metropolitan municipality took 156 social flats that had stood idle for 18 years. It renovated them and let them by public ballot to residents over 65 and to newly married couples, at 100 lira a month. It is adaptive reuse of public stock, it is permanent rental, and it is the closest thing in the city to a European social tenancy. It is also tiny, which is the point worth sitting with.

Saraçoğlu Mahallesi is the argument about what Ankara already owns rather than what it might build. Low-rise, publicly owned and green, it has spent two decades as a court case instead of as housing. Nobody has proposed simply putting people back into it, which is what the estate was designed for and what the city most needs.

TÜRKKENT and TÜRKKONUT, the two national cooperative central unions, still stand above the local structure. Founded in 1988, TÜRKKENT alone has supported the construction of more than 250,000 units. Ankara’s universities, meanwhile, keep documenting what the policy leaves out. The Akkoç and Yirmibeşoğlu study of student renting is a careful account of what a city looks like when the non-market tier is missing. Every tenancy is negotiated one flat at a time.

Ankara does not need to learn cooperative housing. It did this at the scale of a whole town, and the unions, registers, members and land are all still there. What it has lost is the one thing a cooperative cannot manufacture for itself: land on terms it can afford, and money that does not need to earn a market return. Those are policy choices, not facts of nature, and they can be made differently.