Istanbul has roughly 4.1 million dwellings. In its analysis covering 39 districts, the Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation identifies about 1.5 million independent units as unsound, some 600 thousand of which carry a risk of severe damage or collapse in a probable earthquake. A Marmara scenario between M7.1 and M7.2 has a 25 to 30 percent likelihood of occurring within 50 years.

The central argument of the report is this: An earthquake is no longer a financing problem, it is a sequencing problem. The Yarisi Bizden programme provides 875 thousand TL in grants, 875 thousand TL in low interest credit and 125 thousand TL in relocation support per dwelling. 376 thousand units have entered the programme and average completion time has fallen from 28 months to 18.5 months. Even so, the bottleneck is not capital but triage. There is no evidence based, low cost prioritisation mechanism that works at city scale and determines which building gets inspected first. Today the queue forms according to the speed of owner consensus rather than the level of risk.

The six chapters cover the following: Field findings and observed defect signatures from a single shop renovation in Sisli, a risk equation combining hazard with exposure and fragility, the 2012 to 2026 record of the urban transformation machine, the benefit cost ratio of prevention alongside a retrofit versus rebuild comparison, ways to expand triage capacity together with the ethical limits of image based pre screening, and step by step checklists for households, buildings, businesses and decision makers.

The report is public and may be shared freely with attribution. It does not constitute an engineering service or a structural diagnosis. Figures marked with an asterisk are StrategyThrust models or estimates, and primary sources are listed in the methodology appendix.

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