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Private sector investments are the leading factor of housing production today while public agents become a part of the housing market, instead of controlling it. A new consumerist segment in the society has emerged in Turkey after the transition to free market economy, in line with the global tendencies. Luxury housing became an instrument for investment as well as a sign of social status of the inhabitants. Housing production, which is a human right, without public control leads to problems in the field of urban planning. On the one hand, there is a shortage of affordable housing production, on the other development of gated communities surround periphery of the cities. Not only gated communities but also housing development projects in inner cities became the commodities of free market, which constitutes a contradiction with the nature of the planning. The aim of this article is to discuss the gated communities, which epitomize commodified housing production in the frame of consumer society, referring to Istanbul.

Public spaces have been in interrogation in last decades. The focus of the discussions is privatization of public spaces, regarding the way of urbanization. The approaches to the publicness of public spaces developed via diverse considerations such as the ambiguous meanings of the concepts of public and private, the role of public institutions, and control on public spaces. These approaches basically depend on the experiences of advanced capitalist societies. In this research, the aim is to understand the basic characteristics of public spaces in terms of user profiles and user habits in Istanbul in two distinctive districts in Asian side. The public space literature on İstanbul suffers from the lack of the research depending on field survey. Hence, one of the areas is Kadıköy which is located in central part, and urbanized in a conventional fashion. The other one is West Ataşehir developed in the last decade, and built up as a constellation of gated communities, which is called private space-led urbanization in this research. Also, West Ataşe-hir is announced as a new CBD, the so called "Finance Centre of Istanbul". The findings of field research are interesting in terms of similar profiles of users, and quite different with regard to user habits in both cases. The article has for main parts, introduction clarifies the problem, the second part summarizes the debates on public space and publicness, the third part shows the results of the field research, and the last part includes results and conclusions.

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