When city planning agencies were first established, they produced projects based on academic data. These agencies, which we can call the first-generation planning agencies, emerged as structures that contribute to the development of the city by transferring the information produced in the academy to the decision makers.

Although academic data was considered as a very important resource in the design of cities in the next stages, it was seen that this data alone was not sufficient in the urban design processes.

The first-generation planning agencies, which accepted academic knowledge as the basic building block, were not enough to use the thoughts of the people living in the city as data. Second generation planning agencies, which have participatory planning at their core, saw this fundamental deficiency brought participation to the forefront along with academic data. While designing their strategies projects, second generation agencies started to rely on the opinions of people living in that city as well as academic data.

In addition to human-centered academic knowledge participatory planning, ecosystem values ​​have come to the fore in the planning of cities over the years. The climate crisis the loss of biodiversity were the main reasons that triggered this process. From this point of view, there has been a need to establish third generation planning agencies that can use ecosystem data. This new understanding, which includes ecosystem climate data in the planning of cities, forms the basis of circular cities, the cities of the future, which are a part of nature.

İzmir Planning Agency (İZPA) is one of the first examples of third generation planning agencies that produce circular culture projects as a result of the combination of academic data, citizen participation ecosystem data. This new perspective offers important opportunities to build cities in harmony with nature, with each other, with the past with the future. İZPA reveals a universal roadmap from the paradox of the climate crisis, which was originally caused by urbanization but still needs to be resolved in cities.