Istanbul's Building Archive Crisis: The Key Decisions Ahead on Duplicate Image Replacement

Istanbul's urban planning directorate is sitting on tens of thousands of building files in which photographs do not match the structures they are supposed to document — a problem that experts say has direct consequences for the city's earthquake preparedness assessments. The immediate question is not whether to fix the problem, but how, and who pays for it.

The issue surfaced formally this spring when the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Department of Urban Transformation, headquartered in Fatih, flagged systematic inconsistencies in digitised building records during a routine audit linked to the post-2023 Kahramanmaras earthquake review process. Duplicate images — in some cases, a single photograph assigned to dozens of separate structures across different neighbourhoods — have been found embedded in files used to assess structural risk under Turkey's Urban Transformation Law, known formally as Law No. 6306.

Why the Timing Matters

Turkey's government has set aggressive urban renewal targets for Istanbul, a city of roughly 15 million people sitting atop one of the world's most active fault lines. The North Anatolian Fault runs beneath the Sea of Marmara, and seismologists have long warned that a major Istanbul earthquake is a matter of when, not if. Structural risk ratings assigned to buildings in districts such as Bağcılar, Küçükçekmece, and Avcılar rely, in part, on photographic documentation stored in municipal databases. If those photographs are wrong — showing a 1970s concrete-frame apartment in Zeytinburnu when the file nominally covers a reinforced building in Esenyurt — the risk calculation is compromised from the outset.

The Istanbul Earthquake Risk Mitigation and Emergency Preparedness Project, known by its Turkish acronym ISMEP and funded in part through the European Investment Bank, has spent years building out inspection infrastructure across the city's 39 districts. Officials involved in that program have previously stated publicly that the integrity of the photographic record is a foundational requirement for any credible risk register. Discrepancies in that record do not just create administrative headaches; they can delay demolition orders, stall compensation decisions, and leave residents in unsafe structures longer than necessary.

The Decisions Ahead

Three options are now under active discussion within the municipality, according to the public record of the April 2026 planning committee session held at the Saraçhane municipal headquarters. The first is a full re-inspection programme — sending licensed survey teams back to every flagged address to photograph buildings anew. The second is a hybrid approach using satellite imagery and AI-assisted matching tools to cross-reference existing photographs against current street-level data, a method already piloted on a limited basis in the Kadıköy district on the Asian side. The third is to prioritise the highest-risk postcodes first — primarily the older residential zones west of the D-100 highway — and defer lower-priority districts until budget permits.

Cost is the sharpest sticking point. A full re-inspection across all flagged files would require mobilising hundreds of licensed building inspectors for an estimated 18 to 24 months of fieldwork. The municipality's urban transformation budget for 2026 was set at approximately 12 billion Turkish lira — a figure that must also cover active demolition and relocation programmes already under way in Gaziosmanpaşa and parts of Sultangazi. There is no obvious line item for a retroactive image correction sweep of this scale.

The political dimension adds another layer. Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu's administration has consistently pressed the central government for greater fiscal transfers to fund earthquake-preparedness work, arguing that the national budget bears the primary responsibility under Law No. 6306. The AKP-led central government, which controls the Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change Ministry that ultimately certifies building risk classifications, has its own timeline and its own budget pressures. The two sides have not publicly agreed on a cost-sharing formula for the re-inspection work.

What happens in the next 90 days will likely determine the pace of the entire effort. The municipality is expected to present a formal remediation proposal to the city council by September. In the meantime, planners working on active demolition cases in Bağcılar have been instructed to conduct manual photograph verification before issuing any new risk ratings — a procedural patch that slows casework but prevents the worst errors from compounding. Residents whose buildings are under review can check their file status through the municipality's e-Belediye portal, though the system is not yet capable of flagging duplicate-image flags automatically. That upgrade, municipal technology teams say, is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026.