This study examines the impact of urban regeneration on neighborhood attachment and analyzes how different types of interventions shape this relationship. The research is based on the data obtained within the scope of the project “Urban Regeneration and Aging in the Metropolis: The Case of Istanbul” supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TUBITAK). The study focuses on the rapid urban transformation processes in Istanbul and how older people have been affected by this process. The literature has stated urban transformation in general to negatively affect neighborhood attachment, with older residents experiencing the loss of areas to which they feel a sense of belonging.

Displacement and physical changes are among the negative impacts of urban regeneration, which weakens social networks and damages relationships people have with place. For example, state-led projects in Istanbul usually apply extreme interventions such as demolition and reconstruction and target poorer areas. While displacement cases do occur in such projects, centralized organizations such as TOKİ build mass housing areas and offer limited options to beneficiaries. State-led projects have been said to lack participatory mechanisms and to be developed with a centralized approach that does not involve those affected in the process. These projects also have problems involving low compensation rates, loans, and property transfer.

Mixed model and market-led transformations are mostly implemented in areas where the middle class lives. For example, transformations were carried out in neighborhoods (e.g., Fikirtepe neighborhood of Istanbul’s Kadıköy district) with private contractors after state-led planning. Such projects may yield more positive results if social and physical elements are handled in an integrated manner.

Approaches such as aging in place, age-friendly cities, and lifelong neighborhoods stand out among policies that will improve older people’s welfare regarding urban transformation. Strengthening accessibility, cleanliness, safety, and social networks are important for ensuring that older people are not negatively affected by urban regeneration. Moreover, strengthening physical and social infrastructure can mitigate the perceived negative consequences of transformation by supporting local identity and neighborhood attachment. As a result, addressing the social and physical dimensions of urban regeneration projects in a balanced manner plays a critical role in maintaining older people’s neighborhood attachment.

Method

Study Design

This study was conducted to test the assumption that older residents’ neighborhood attachment levels decreased after experiencing the state-led urban transformation. The study uses the quantitative method and benefits from face-to-face survey data. The study data were collected from the project titled “Urban Transformation and Aging in the Metropolis: The Case of Istanbul” as carried out by the Istanbul University Sociology Research Center in 2018-2019. This study formed a suitable dataset for its question based on the project’s dataset before carrying out the quantitative analysis.

Sample

The population of the study consists of 912,042 people aged 65 or over living in Istanbul (7.5% of the total population; Turkish Statistical Institute [TurkStat], 2017). The above-mentioned project had calculated a minimum sample size for Istanbul as N = 1,818, with a 5% margin of error at a 95% confidence interval. Using the stratified sampling technique, the project then distributed the sample proportionally according to the distribution of older people in each district. The project next used the purposive sampling method to determine the districts and related neighborhoods according to the type of urban intervention (i.e., state-led, market-led, mixed) and distributed the sample in accordance with the distribution of the older population. Because the current study targets older people living in places that have experienced or are planned to undergo state-led and/or market-led urban transformations, the sample size was reduced to 959 by creating a second sample from the original quantitative dataset of individuals aged 65 or older who’ve experienced urban transformation and live in neighborhoods where a transformation is about to take place. Accordingly, 10.4% of the sample consists of people who have experienced state-led or mixed model interventions, 54.6% of the sample are expected to experience a state-led or mixed model intervention, and 35% are expected to experience a market-led intervention.

 Data Collection Tools

The study benefitted from the dataset of the project titled “Urban Transformation and Ageing in the Metropolis: The Case of Istanbul” (author/s, year). Accordingly, while the type of intervention is the independent variable, neighborhood attachment level is the dependent variable. Details about the variables are given below.

Type of Intervention

 This study involves those who have experienced or are candidates for experiencing urban transformation in Istanbul’s districts and has categorized the participants according to the type of intervention they have faced or expect to face. Intervention types are state-led, market-led, and mixed model. Accordingly, the participants are grouped into three categories: (1) those who are experienced in state-led or mixed model urban regeneration, (2) those who are inexperienced in state-led or mixed model urban regeneration, and (3) those who are inexperienced in market-led urban regeneration.

This study is based on the assumption that state-led urban regeneration practices have a negative impact on neighborhood attachment. From this point of view, comparing these to market-led urban regeneration areas is important and why it is one of the participant categories.

 Neighborhood Attachment Scale

This study adapts the four-item Neighborhood Attachment Scale (Fornara et al., 2010) to the case being addressed herein and has added some new items (see Table 2). Participants indicated their agreement or disagreement using a 5-point Likert-type scale. The Neighborhood Attachment Scale developed in the study has two factors. The first factor is neighborhood attachment, which consists of a sense of belonging to the neighborhood, identification with the neighborhood, and physical attachment, while the second factor is neighborhood relations, which has the subdimensions of security and sociability. The total explained variance has been measured as 47.7%. A reliability analysis of the scale was also conducted, with an alpha coefficient of 0.75 (α = 0.75) being found.

In order to understand the changes in neighborhood attachment levels before and after the intervention, three steps were taken. Firstly, the study separated the areas the state had already transformed from the areas that will be transformed and examined the differences between the scores from the Neighborhood Attachment Scale. Secondly, the people who’d experienced state-led urban transformation were asked “How has your neighborhood attachment changed. Has it decreased, increased, or not changed?” Thirdly, all participants were asked about their perceptions on whether the urban transformation had increased or decreased the physical and social components of neighborhood attachment (e.g., frequency of meeting with neighbors, housing durability, safety in housing, comfort of living, street safety, neighborhood safety, regional prestige).

Data Analysis/Processing

Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS quantitative data analysis software. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed over the variables of neighborhood attachment and type of intervention, with eta-square values and frequency tables being used to calculate effect sizes.

 Results

This study has examined the impact of urban transformation on neighborhood attachment and questioned the effect of state-led transformations on neighborhood attachment. According to the results from the one-way ANOVA, significant differences were found between neighborhood attachment scores according to different intervention types and urban transformation experiences. The neighborhood attachment levels of the groups under the threat of state-led transformation were found to be higher than those whose neighborhood had not experienced transformation but were expected to undergo a market-led transformation. However, the effect size was found to be low (ɳ2≅ .01).

The survey results show that of the older people who’d experienced state-led transformation, 65.5% stated that their neighborhood attachment levels had not changed, 19.5% stated that their levels had increased, and 14.9% stated that their levels had decreased. This indicates other factors to be present that affect neighborhood attachment. However, the levels for public familiarity and the frequency of encountering familiar faces decreased, with 67.8% of older people reporting having encountered unfamiliar faces and 46% reporting a decrease in physical familiarity. The frequency of meeting former neighbors had decreased or was expected to decrease, but relationships with family members generally remained unchanged.

In areas undergoing state-led transformation, differences were noted according to housing type. For example, 21.8% of older people live in family apartments and are able to maintain their social networks. For those in slums, transformation offers a more comfortable and secure life. The increase in living comfort and improvement in housing security contributed to the preservation of neighborhood attachment.

While 60.6% of older individuals stated that their living comfort had increased after the transformation, 60% of those expecting to undergo the transformation think that their living conditions will improve. The difference between security expectations and post-transformation reality is striking: 40.4% of those who’d experienced the transformation stated that street security had increased, while 65.1% of those who are waiting for the transformation stated expecting security to increase. This difference shows that the transformations are not handled in an integrated manner with environmental arrangements.

Lastly, 71.7% of those who’d experienced state-led urban transformation and 78.6% of those who are expecting to experience a mixed-model transformation stated their neighborhood prestige to have increased. The increase in prestige was emphasized as being related to the expectation of economic gain, with neighborhood attachment being correlated to this perception.

 Discussion and Conclusion

 This study has tested the assumption that state-led urban regeneration projects have a negative impact on neighborhood attachment and found that, contrary to what was predicted, neighborhood attachment did not decrease in state-led urban regeneration practices.

The findings contradict previous studies (Atkinson, 2000; Cin & Egercioglu, 2016; Fu & Jiang, 2024; Lomas et al., 2021; Shamsuddin & Ujang, 2008; Slater, 2010; Torres, 2020) that had suggested urban regeneration to damage neighborhood attachment by damaging social familiarity, physical familiarity, and the associated relationship with place. Meanwhile, other previous studies (Casakin & Neikrug, 2012; Kleinhans et al., 2014; Lewis et al., 2022; Mehdipanah et al., 2013; Phillips et al., 2005; Sha, 2023) have shown older residents’ satisfaction levels to increase when certain social and physical conditions are met in urban transformation, with this positively affecting psychological well-being and neighborhood attachment. Therefore, evaluating the social and physical dimensions of transformation that give meaning to a place will be important for better understanding the findings (Lewicka, 2011).

Accordingly, the first striking finding is that the majority of the participants who’d experienced state-led urban transformation stated social familiarity (67.8%) and physical familiarity (46%) to have decreased. Therefore, this supports the literature on urban transformation that shows social and physical familiarity levels to be reduced; despite this, however, the study did not show the predicted decrease in neighborhood attachment to have occurred. This points to the presence of other factors that ensure neighborhood attachment. The literature (Lewis et al., 2022; Sha, 2023) has shown that, despite the significant change, perceived outcomes of urban regeneration improve when adequate social infrastructure is provided.

Some other noteworthy findings in this study point to conditions that preserve neighborhood attachment. First of all, the vast majority of participants who’d experienced state-led urban regeneration reported their relationships with their children (82.8%), grandchildren (75.9%), and neighbors (59.6%) to have remained unchanged. As Rubinstein and Parmelee (1992) stated, the sense of belonging to a place is related to one’s life course, particularly for older individuals. In this regard, conditions such as the facts that a significant percentage of older people in the current study’s sample live in family apartment buildings specific to the urbanization of Türkiye and that state-led transformations are collective in nature may have enabled older individuals to experience urban transformation without a significant change to their social networks. In addition, when considering how older people perceive themselves as being quite sensitive to changes in their physical environment and functional structure (Temelova & Slezakova, 2014), going from living in poorer quality buildings for years in Istanbul then starting to live in more comfortable and safer earthquake-resistant buildings may have had a positive effect on the psychological well-being of the sample and their relationship with a place. In fact, most of the participants who’d experienced state-led urban transformation stated that their comfort of living (60%), street safety (40%), and regional prestige (71%) had increased. Previous studies (Burns et al., 2012; Michael et al., 2006; Sun et al., 2020; Yung et al., 2015) have shown the relationship of older people who live in urban areas with their place is related to neighborhood design, a clean pleasant physical environment, safety, and various social characteristics. Therefore, according to the findings obtained in this study, elderly residents who have experienced state-led urban regeneration in Istanbul can be claimed to have evaluated the changes in social and physical dimensions in relation to the life course and to have (re)made sense of their relation to place accordingly.

Some findings that are intriguing for further research are also noteworthy. The first of these is that the respondents who’d experienced urban regeneration (40%) have a weaker view toward urban regeneration improving street safety compared to those who are expected to undergo this (state-led inexperienced = 65.1%; market-led inexperienced = 58.9%). Accordingly, one important research question may be whether urban regeneration has the promised effect in solving security-related problems. The second intriguing finding is the strong perception that urban regeneration increases neighborhood prestige. All three groups that were formed according to the type of intervention had a strong perception that urban regeneration increases neighborhood prestige (state-led experienced = 71.7%; state-led inexperienced = 78.6%; market-led inexperienced = 78.6%). The relationship between the perception that urban transformation will increase the prestige of a region and the economic benefit to be obtained from the urban transformation, as well as its relationship with neighborhood attachment, seems worthy of further research.