Istanbul; the Outgrowing City

ABSTRACT Every city grows up or downsizing because of different causes. We usually talk about overcrowding of cities because of general crowding of earth’s population. There is a lot of materials about growth / overcrowding of İstanbul with domestic migration especially after industrialization. This fast overcrowding also reveals a necessity of constructing with growing of the city through its borders, and also causes to increase of construction intensity in existing settlements. Besides these İstanbul is also growing as its area while its borders are same with its close-by cities. There are no changes in its borders but İstanbul is growing especially after 1980 in every decade. It is not a big change as area but as location – in its crowded / populated / experiencing settlements – is changing artefactually. İstanbul’s natural borders / shorelines are changing day by day by infills. İstanbul’s shore formation, city – sea combination/relation changes every day. Methodology of this paper is to identify the maps of İstanbul from different years to see the changes in shorelines, and to collect the news about ongoing or scheduled infill projects in İstanbul. Almost all shorelines of İstanbul are intervened in different ways in different periods. Less intervened Black sea shores will have more population and that will cause more infills in these shorelines too. Interventions to shorelines is parallel with population density and we sadly can see that they will continue.