The COVID-19 crises created a drastic confrontation with our urban, and housing environments. This chapter examines two very different parts of the city of Mardin, Turkey, one modern and one traditional, and how they dealt with the first wave of the pandemic. During the lockdown, the modern part of the city that was primarily developed through generic urban development patterns based on modernist infrastructure, went through a complete paralysis. The insufficient living conditions within its apartments and interrupted service provision emerged as the most problematic issues. On the other hand the historic parts of Mardin, built using traditional methods, sustained a healthier context, despite lacking many of the comforts of modern living and modern housing. Experiencing these differences in lockdown, the old city center's efficiency in dealing with the pandemic, compared with the ineffectiveness of more modern neighborhoods, evoked the need to explore the features of our cities that create more self-sufficient, and thus, tolerable living conditions in the COVID-19 era.

The urbanization of Turkey is generally analyzed in three consecutive periods that correspond to major social, political, economic, and spatial transformations: The Early Republican Era of 1920–50, the Post-War era of 1950–80, and the Neoliberal Era of post-1980 (Bozdogan, 2001, Akcan, 2012). The first period:

The first era was ideologically centered on creating a modern national identity from scratch, liberated from any bonds to the past, including the 600 years of the Ottoman era. Thus, socio-cultural modernization and its urban correspondence utilized Tabula Rasa as a means of that ideology. Starting from the second era, though, with accelerated industrialization, increasing rural-urban migrations, and liberalization in economics, modern urban development could only become an urgent response to the housing problem of vast numbers of migrating populations. Leaving aside design and planning procedures along with the consideration of geography-specific natural, socio-cultural, and economic contexts, a mass sprawl of uniform urban development occurred during this era.