How Istanbul's Building Stock Ended Up Photographed a Dozen Times Over — and Why Nobody Noticed

Istanbul's municipal property registry holds records for roughly 1.4 million parcels across the city's 39 districts. A significant share of those records, city planning officials have acknowledged in public sessions at the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Directorate of Zoning and Urbanism, carry at least one duplicate image — the same photograph attached to two or more separate cadastral entries, sometimes for buildings on opposite sides of the Bosphorus.

The problem did not arrive suddenly. It accumulated over two decades of parallel digitisation efforts that were never fully reconciled, and it now sits at the centre of a push by the municipality's GIS and Urban Transformation units to clean the records before Istanbul's next mandatory seismic risk audit cycle, which planning documents indicate is scheduled to begin in late 2026 under obligations stemming from the post-2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake reform package passed by the Grand National Assembly.

Three Databases, Zero Coordination

The root of the duplication problem lies in the early 2000s, when Istanbul ran at least three separate digitisation programmes simultaneously. The General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre, known by its Turkish acronym TKGM, maintained its own photographic archive. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality ran a separate aerial and street-level survey. District municipalities — Fatih, Kadıköy, Beşiktaş and others — each photographed buildings independently for their own permit and zoning files. Nobody mandated a shared image identifier at the time, and cross-referencing was done manually, when it was done at all.

By the time a unified digital platform was discussed seriously, the three systems had diverged too far to merge cleanly. A 2018 modernisation push under the then-AKP-led metropolitan administration imported roughly 400,000 legacy image files into a new central server in the Kartal technology hub on the Asian side, but migration logs reviewed by The Daily Istanbul show the process flagged more than 60,000 potential duplicates without resolving them. The flags sat in a queue.

The 2019 municipal election, which brought CHP candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu to power, reset administrative priorities. İmamoğlu's team launched a broader open-data initiative through the municipality's Bilgi İşlem Dairesi — the city's IT department, headquartered in Saraçhane near the Atatürk Library — but the duplicate image backlog remained a second-tier item while the administration focused on budget audits and transport projects.

Earthquake Reform Forces the Issue

The Kahramanmaraş earthquakes of February 2023 changed the political calculus. Parliament subsequently tightened requirements for urban transformation zones, and Istanbul — with an estimated 90,000 buildings assessed as high seismic risk under Turkey's DASK insurance authority's own figures — became the most scrutinised municipality in the country. Accurate, non-duplicated property records are a legal precondition for issuing demolition and reconstruction licences under the urban transformation law.

That legal pressure, more than any internal reform drive, is what has moved duplicate image replacement from a backlog item to an active project. The municipality's Kentsel Dönüşüm Müdürlüğü, which coordinates urban transformation across districts, confirmed in a public procurement notice published on the Public Procurement Authority platform in March 2026 that it was tendering a contract worth up to 47 million Turkish lira for database cleansing and image re-acquisition work in 12 priority districts, including Avcılar, Bağcılar, and Zeytinburnu — all flagged as high-risk zones near the North Anatolian Fault.

For property owners, the practical consequences are immediate. A duplicate image on a cadastral record can block a transformation application for months. Owners in Zeytinburnu's Telsizler neighbourhood, where older five-storey residential blocks from the 1970s dominate the streetscape along Çırpıcı Caddesi, have reported delays running to eight months while clerks manually verified which photograph belonged to which parcel number.

The tender for the cleansing contract closed in May 2026. Work is expected to begin in the third quarter of this year, with the 12 priority districts targeted for completion before the seismic audit cycle opens. Districts outside that initial list — including parts of Beyoğlu and the historic peninsula in Fatih — will follow in a second phase whose timeline has not yet been formalised in public documents. Property owners with pending transformation applications are advised to contact their district municipality's imar müdürlüğü directly to check whether their parcel number appears on the active cleansing list.