Assembly areas as urban infrastructure: disaster governance, spatial equity, and the protection of public open space in seismically exposed cities

Busra Karagoz, Yasemin Didem Aktas 

Disaster assembly areas - designated open spaces where populations gather following a major earthquake - represent a critical but neglected component of urban resilience infrastructure. Using Istanbul as a primary case study, this Perspective examines how assembly area provision has been systematically eroded through routine planning decisions made outside the disaster management apparatus. Our spatial analysis of 5,570 designated sites reveals a citywide per-capita provision of 2.98 m² - below the Sphere humanitarian minimum - with acute spatial inequality: districts carrying the oldest, most seismically vulnerable building stock simultaneously show the worst assembly provision, a double jeopardy condition affecting 31.7 per cent of Istanbul's 973 neighbourhoods. The pattern is not unique to Istanbul: comparative evidence from Kathmandu, Tehran, and Lima demonstrates that the commodification of urban open space under development pressure is a global phenomenon, consistently outpacing disaster governance frameworks. We argue that four shifts are required - statutory protection for designated sites, vulnerability-weighted spatial allocation, fitness-for-purpose verification, and community-level awareness - and that the fundamental barrier is not technical but institutional: the systematic disconnection between land-use planning and disaster management that allows assembly space to be quietly withdrawn from public use one planning amendment at a time.