Istanbul's Historic Districts Face a Defining Moment Over Duplicate and Illegal Building Records

Istanbul's land registry system is sitting on a problem that has been building for decades. Municipal surveyors and officials at the Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü — Turkey's General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre — have been working through a backlog of digitised property files in which duplicate images, overlapping parcel records and mismatched plot boundaries have created legal ambiguity for tens of thousands of property owners across the city. The audit, which covers districts from Fatih to Küçükçekmece, is expected to produce binding recommendations by the end of 2026.

The timing matters. Istanbul is three years out from the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, and the city's own seismic vulnerability studies — particularly for older building stock in Avcılar, Zeytinburnu and Bağcılar — have made clean, legally unambiguous property records a precondition for the urban transformation programme that both the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and the central government say they want to accelerate. You cannot demolish and rebuild a block of flats if the title deed attached to it is a duplicate entry pointing to two different owners. That is the core problem.

Where the Confusion Is Sharpest

The Kadıköy and Beyoğlu districts have some of the highest concentrations of disputed registry entries, according to property lawyers and surveyors who work routinely with the land office on İstiklal Caddesi's administrative side streets. In Balat, along the Golden Horn waterfront, Ottoman-era plot boundaries that were photographed and catalogued in the 1950s were re-digitised in the early 2000s under a World Bank-supported modernisation programme. That second pass created mirrored image files for hundreds of parcels — some showing the same courtyard wall attributed to different deeds. Residents in Balat have been caught in inheritance disputes that hinge on which image file the courts treat as authoritative.

Zeytinburnu, flagged by Istanbul's own disaster risk maps as a high-priority zone for structural renewal, has a further complication. Roughly 30 percent of the district's residential buildings were constructed before 1999 and predate the strengthened earthquake codes introduced after the Marmara earthquake that August. Many of those buildings sit on parcels where the registry image and the physical footprint on the ground no longer match — partly because of informal extensions, partly because of the duplicate-record problem. Urban transformation cannot legally begin on a parcel under active title dispute.

The Decisions That Will Determine the Outcome

Three choices now sit in front of municipal and national authorities, and each carries significant consequences for ordinary Istanbulites. First, the land registry directorate must decide whether to adopt a single authoritative digital image standard and retire all legacy scans — a technically straightforward but administratively enormous task estimated to affect more than 400,000 parcel records across the European and Asian sides of the city. Second, the courts must clarify the evidentiary weight of a digital cadastral image versus a physical survey measurement when the two conflict. Third, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, led by CHP mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, and the AKP-controlled central government must agree on a shared timeline for urban transformation in the disputed districts — an agreement that has so far proved elusive given the political tensions between the two administrations.

Property lawyers active in the Anadolu Adliyesi courthouse in Kartal, where many of the eastern-district title disputes are heard, say the backlog of unresolved cadastral cases has grown noticeably since 2024. Cases that previously moved through the system in 18 months are now taking closer to 30. For homeowners in Zeytinburnu waiting for a demolition-and-rebuild permit — and for the contractors and municipal planners who depend on legal clarity before they can mobilise — every month of delay is a month of exposure in buildings that risk assessors have already rated as vulnerable.

The land registry directorate has signalled it will publish a revised national digitisation standard before the end of the third quarter of 2026. If that standard is adopted and the courts follow, Istanbul's urban transformation programme could begin processing the first legally clean parcels in the high-risk districts by mid-2027. If the two administrations cannot agree on implementation, the duplicate-record problem will simply continue to compound — and the seismic clock keeps running regardless.