There has been a great deal of controversy about the impact ofphysical planning on the lives and behavior of people, in whichsocial scientists have taken an increasingly active part . As aresult, greater user-orientedness and interdisciplinary inputinto the design process have gained widespread acceptability inthe industrialized West. In developing countries the controversyis further complicated by the additional factors of rapid socialchange and?extremely limited resources which curtail theappropriateness of design solutions drastically. It is thereforeno accident that one type of response to housing problems indeveloping countries has been to respect and support spontaneousdevelopments.Thus,Turner has cogently argued.that self-selectingoccupant-builder communities of the squatter settlement type areboth economically and socially most feasible because, among otherthings, they have the ability to develop with the rythm of socialand economic change, eventually turning into "self-improvingsuburbs".3 In contrast, official housing policies and projectsWhich telescope the development process by providing minimummodern standards in a non-progressive fashion often do violenceto user needs and resources. While the merits of.this argumentare clear, the weight to be assigned to self-help versus publicsubsidy remains a debatable issue which raises problems ofresource allocation at a broader societal level.1* Furthermore,the tenability of this proposition is closely linked to thelevel of development of the society in question. In Turkeywhere there is a steady growth of stabily employed urbanites inthe modern sector of the economy, it is not only the so-calledmarginal urbanites who are excluded from the official housingmarket, but also tax-paying blue-collar workers among others,whose social security deductions are in part meant to accrue tothem in the form of housing credits. Lack of organizationalresources has by and large made them unable to activate thenecessary bureaucratic mechanisms to obtain these funds and acontinued reliance on self-help procedures, at considerablepersonal and social cost, has so far been the rule. There istherefore an increasing awareness of the need for projectsthat will help channel public housing funds to their intendedrecipients, namely low-income urbanites
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