Istanbul's Duplicate Image Problem: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Istanbul's municipal digital infrastructure has a reproducibility problem. Duplicate and misidentified images embedded in the city's planning permit files, heritage documentation systems, and public-facing urban renewal portals have been flagging inconsistencies for at least 18 months, according to municipal records reviewed by The Daily Istanbul. The issue has drawn pointed commentary from urban planners, archivists, and civic technology advocates who say the problem undermines decisions that affect some of the city's most sensitive districts.

The timing matters. Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, known by its Turkish acronym IBB, has been accelerating its digital transformation programme since 2024 under pressure to modernise building safety records following the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes. Accurate visual documentation of building stock — particularly in high-risk neighbourhoods — is now directly tied to earthquake resilience policy. When the same image appears across multiple property files, or when photographs are incorrectly linked to addresses, the downstream effect on risk assessments can be significant.

Where the Problem Shows Up

Two sites have emerged as focal points in the debate. The Fatih district, which contains both dense pre-Republican residential fabric and dozens of Ottoman-era monuments near the Theodosian Walls, has the city's highest concentration of buildings flagged for seismic vulnerability. Digital records held by the IBB's Directorate of Historic Environment and Architectural Heritage are supposed to accompany each assessment with site-specific photographic documentation. Civic technology group Açık Veri Istanbul, which tracks public data quality, has argued publicly that duplicate image entries have appeared in batch uploads to that system — though the organisation has stopped short of specifying how many files are affected without a full audit.

The second flashpoint is the Boğaziçi İmar Müdürlüğü, the Bosphorus Development Directorate, where permit applications for construction projects along the strait's European and Asian shorelines must include detailed visual records. A submission reviewed by this reporter — obtained through a freedom of information request filed in April 2026 — showed the same exterior photograph attached to two structurally different buildings at separate addresses in Bebek and Arnavutköy. The directorate acknowledged the discrepancy in a written response dated 14 May 2026 but described it as an isolated data-entry error.

Urban planner Selin Atabay, who teaches at Istanbul Technical University's Faculty of Architecture and has consulted for the IBB on previous mapping projects, has written in the journal Megaron that image deduplication should be treated as a mandatory pre-processing step before any file enters a planning decision pipeline. Her February 2026 article did not name the IBB specifically but described municipal systems in Turkish megacities as routinely under-resourced for metadata verification. ITU's faculty sits on Taşkışla campus in Beyoğlu, a short walk from the municipal offices in Saraçhane where permit workflows are managed.

Pressure Builds for a Formal Audit

The Istanbul branch of the Chamber of City Planners — Şehir Plancıları Odası İstanbul Şubesi — passed a resolution in June 2026 calling on the IBB to commission an independent image-integrity audit of all permit files submitted since January 2024. The chamber set a deadline of 1 October 2026 for a formal response. That resolution is now a reference point in ongoing negotiations between the IBB's technology directorate and the chamber's technical committee.

The IBB has not publicly committed to the audit timeline. A written statement from the municipality's communications unit, issued 27 June 2026 and posted on the IBB website, described the existing quality-control workflows as adequate and noted that a new file-management platform is scheduled for rollout across all district offices by the end of 2026. The statement did not address the specific Bebek-Arnavutköy case.

For residents and property owners, the practical stakes are immediate. Buildings in Fatih and Zeytinburnu that sit on first- and second-degree earthquake risk zones — classifications that determine eligibility for the government's Urban Transformation Law grants — depend on accurate photographic records to pass initial screening. A mismatched image can delay a file by weeks and, in some cases, disqualify a building from the programme entirely until the error is manually corrected. The chamber's October deadline, and the IBB's platform rollout at year-end, will be the next two moments when the city's answer to this quiet but consequential problem becomes clearer.