Issued after a succession of Istanbul fires, the 1848 Ebniye Nizamnamesi was the empire's first general building regulation: three classes of street with minimum widths (main streets at 7.6 m), setbacks, height limits graded by construction type, and masonry requirements against fire. The 1863 Turuk ve Ebniye Nizamnamesi extended the rules from Istanbul to all Ottoman cities and charged municipalities with widening and straightening streets, above all when rebuilding burnt districts. The 1882 Ebniye Kanunu consolidated the system and gave municipalities powers of alignment, plot regularisation and expropriation; it governed Ottoman and early Turkish urban practice until the Building and Roads Law of 1933.
These regulations converted the timber, cul-de-sac, courtyard quarter of the Ottoman city into a regulated street-and-plot city, using fire as the occasion and the municipality as the instrument. They are the Ottoman counterpart of the Prussian building-lines law and the direct ancestor of Turkish zoning, and they shaped rebuilt districts from Istanbul to Izmir, Salonica and Beirut.
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