French Planner Henri Prost's Istanbul Master Plans, His Housing Planning Ideas and Methods as an Architect-urbanist

Abstract

The scope of the French architect-urbanist Henri Prost’s Istanbul planning and his doctrinal approach have been researched and discussed in each period, but the housing issue in his studies remained unknown. The presented research was expected to contribute to the literature as it is the first research to examine the housing issue in Prost plans and re-examine old planning methods recently comeback on the agenda like E. Howard. The research examined H. Prost’s Istanbul Master plans, in the first half of the 20th century, in the context of housing and his main identity as an architect. Also, French planning theories and his ideological l’école (school’s) thinking resource Le Musée-Sociale (Social Museum) a think-tank, legislator and executory institution and its predecessor-influencer is Frédérick Le Play. The social-based old ideologies were transformed via French architect-urbanist H. Prost in the Early Republican period in Türkiye, and they played an important role in the modernization and development of Istanbul. Although the housing problem was not included in the Governmental policies of that period, H. Prost planned some housing areas and housing models with his own initiative. Thus, the research methodology based on a paradigm change centered on the H. Prost's architect identity in lower-architectural scale instead of upper urban-scale research methods adopted by previous research. A taxonomy is prepared with the anachronic approach to reveal the housing models and typologies for various regions of Istanbul. It was found that H. Prost, empirical data, taxonomy and typologies, housing production supported the main assumption in the research. © 2023 by authors. All rights reserved.