The promised territories: the production of branded housing projects in contemporary Turkey

Cities in Turkey, following the neoliberal restructuring of the country, have undergone a process of transformation in the last decade at a greater pace than experienced in previous periods. Through these processes, while new territories have been constructed, previous formations have been dismantled. While some of these constructed territories are abstract (e.g. Nomenclature of Units for Territorial Statistics [NUTS] regions), some are tangible and physically defined such as branded housing enclaves. Branded housing projects produce territories in the form of housing enclaves, which provide key services and facilities within their confines exclusively for project residents. By 2013, the number of branded housing projects located in Istanbul alone numbered 852 with the number of units provided by these projects amounting to 7.7% of the total housing stock the city (Sarıçayır 01/21/2014). This paper argues that these territories are co-produced by political society and civil society (in Gramscian terms): while political society regulates and directly contributes to the production of these territories through public actors involved in the branded housing projects, civil society contributes through the production of social consent for such developments. The article discusses the role of political society and civil society in the production of branded housing projects by focusing on the case of Emlak Konut GYO (Real Estate Partnership) projects developed in Istanbul between 2003 and 2014. Firstly, the role of political society is discussed through the roles of TOKI (Housing Development Administration of Turkey) and Emlak Konut GYO as major public actors in the development of these territories; and secondly, the role of civil society is discussed through excavating the traces of production of social consent for branded housing projects in news articles published on Emlak Konut GYO projects between 2003 and 2014. The paper concludes that branded housing projects are emerging as spatial territories in contemporary Turkey as a result of hegemonic struggle through political society and civil society

Resource dedication problem in a multi-project environment

Resource dedication problem (RDP) in a multi-project environment is defined as the optimal dedication of resource capacities to dierent projects within the overall limits of the resources with the objective of minimizing the sum of the weighted tardinesses of all projects. The projects involved are in general multi-mode resource constrained project scheduling problems (MRCPSP) with nish to start zero time lag and nonpreemtive activities. In general, approaches to multi-project scheduling consider the resources as a pool shared by all projects. When projects are distributed geographically or sharing resources between projects is too costly, then the resource sharing policy may not be appropriate and hence the resources are dedicated to individual projects throughout project durations. To the best of our knowledge, this point of view for resources is not considered in multi-project literature. In the following, we propose a solution methodology for RDP with a new local improvement heuristic by determining the resource dedications to individual projects and solving scheduling problems with the given resource limits

A modied branch and cut procedure for resource portfolio problem under relaxed resource dedication policy

Multi-project scheduling problems are characterized by the way resources are managed in the problem environment. The general approach in multi-project scheduling literature is to consider resource capacities as a common pool that can be shared among all projects without any restrictions or costs. The way the resources are used in a multi-project environment is called resource management policy and the aforementioned assumption is called Resource Sharing Policy in this study. The resource sharing policy is not a generalization for multi-project scheduling environments and different resource management policies maybe defined to identify characteristics of different problem environments. In this study, we present a resource management policy which prevents sharing of resources among projects but allows resource transfers when a project starts after the completion of another one. This policy is called the Relaxed Resource Dedication (RRD) Policy in this study. The general resource capacities might or might not be decision variables. We will treat here the case where the general available amounts of resources are decision variables to be determined subject to a limited budget. We call this problem as the Resource Portfolio Problem (RPP). In this study, RPP is investigated under RRD policy and a modified Branch and Cut (B&C)procedure based on CPLEX is proposed. The B&C procedure of CPLEX is modified with different branching strategies, heuristic solution approaches and valid inequalities. The computational studies presented demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution approaches

Resource preference based improvement heuristics for resource portfolio problem

The multi-project problem environment under consideration involves multiple-projects with activities having alternative execution modes, a general resource budget and a resource management policy that does not allow sharing of resources among projects. The multi-project scheduling model for this problem environment is called Resource Portfolio Problem. There are three basic conceptual problems in RPP: (i) determining the general resource capacities from the given general resource budget (general resource capacities determination); (ii) dedication of the general resource capacities to projects (resource dedication) and finally (iii) scheduling of individual projects with the given resource dedications. In this study, different preference based improvement heuristics are proposed for general resource capacities determination and resource dedication conceptual problems. For general resource capacities determination, the current general resource capacity values are changed according to the resource preferences such that the resulting capacity state would be more preferable. Similarly for resource dedication, resource dedication values of projects are changed according to the preferences of projects for resources such that the resulting resource dedication state would be more preferable. These two improvement heuristics separates and couples the conceptual problems. Different preference calculation methods are proposed employing Lagrangian relaxation and linear relaxation of MRCPSP formulation