WRI - Caferağa Liveable Neighbourhood

WRI Türkiye asked us to answer a plain question about a very well known neighbourhood: what are its streets actually made of, and what would it take to change them. Caferağa and Osmanağa lie behind the Kadıköy ferry terminal and hold, between them, the market, the tram, the cinemas, the meyhanes, the schools and the seafront. Over the winter of 2023–24 we walked and measured every street in the area, sorted them into typologies, and then took one of them all the way to construction drawings.

The work was the second activity of WRI Türkiye's Istanbul Deep Dive Programme on neighbourhood-focused active mobility planning, carried out with Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and Kadıköy Municipality.

WALKING THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Between December 2023 and February 2024 we surveyed 136 numbered streets on foot, splitting them wherever conditions changed along their length — which brought the count of separate cross-sections to around 150. Mühürdar Caddesi alone took seven: it begins as a 7.2 metre pedestrian street at the market and ends as a 23.3 metre tram street on the way to Moda.

For each segment we recorded the same things. Length and width. The width of the travel lane, the parking lane and each footway, and how much of each footway was actually walkable once the goods, tables, bins and infrastructure boxes were counted. Kerb height and whether there were ramps. Paving material. Where the trees, benches, awnings and bike racks were. Whether a school, a playground, a mosque, a health centre, a market day or a tram stop sat on the street. Pedestrian flow, and what people were doing there. Every segment was photographed and pinned to its coordinates, and the whole set was written into a spreadsheet built to drop straight into ArcGIS.

The range this turned up is the point. Söğütlü Çeşme Caddesi is a 46.5 metre boulevard with four lanes of traffic. Caferağa Mescidi Sokak, four hundred metres away, is 5.9 metres wide and has no traffic at all. They are both, in the plan, simply streets.

SEVENTEEN KINDS OF STREET

We grouped what we had found into seventeen typologies, under five headings: commercial, residential, streets with a key destination, recreational, and transit. Commercial streets divide by whether they are pedestrian-only, one-way or two-way, and by how many sides of them are parked on. Residential streets divide the same way, plus stair streets and dead ends. Streets with a key destination are named for what is on them — a school, a theatre, a health centre. Each typology was given a representative street, and each representative street a measured cross-section.

Sorting streets this way is not an academic exercise. It means a decision taken about one street can be applied to the forty that behave like it, and it gives the two municipalities a shared vocabulary for a neighbourhood they administer between them.

PROPOSALS, ONE PER TYPE

Streets were selected in March 2024 for design proposals, and by September we had drawn pilot interventions for six of them, each standing in for its type: Moda Caddesi as a prestige street, Mühürdar Caddesi as a commercial street, Şair Nefi Sokak as a transit street, Dr. Esat Işık Caddesi and Leylek Sokak as school streets, Keresteci Aziz Sokak as a residential street.

The moves are ordinary and repeatable. Turn the traffic one way and take back the lane you have freed. Put chicanes in where cars go too fast. Lay grass pavers where cars stand, so the rain goes down instead of along. Run green strips as rain gardens. Roughen the surface at the junctions with split setts, which slows drivers more reliably than a sign does. Raise the crossing to footway level outside the schools. And make the edge elements — the things that stop a car mounting the kerb — wide enough and flat enough that somebody can sit on them.

MODA CADDESİ

Of the six, Moda Caddesi was taken to a full drawing set. We designed the street at 1:500 and the critical stretches at 1:100, with sections, details, a materials palette, a planting list and quantities.

Three principles ran through it: pedestrian safety, public space, nature-based solutions. Traffic runs one way. The parking bays are laid in concrete grass pavers rather than asphalt. The junctions are split granite sett, rough enough to be felt through the steering wheel. The footways are brushed in-situ concrete with a joint every metre and a half, edged with machine-cut granite setts in grey and white, and held by anodised stainless steel elements shaped to be sat on.

The drawings went to Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and Kadıköy Municipality at the end of November 2024. WRI Türkiye is carrying the findings forward into a guide, so that the next neighbourhood does not have to start by counting its own streets.