Participation in housing renewal in Istanbul in the face of seismic risk: a mixed methods research

This article explores the conditions of risk action by examining why acknowledged seismic risk often fails to generate participation in collective risk reduction measures. Drawing on the case of housing renewal in Istanbul, Türkiye, it argues that seismic risk does not operate as a continuous motivational force but as a latent condition whose influence is activated only when specific agency-enabling thresholds are crossed. Rather than interpreting non-action as a deficit of risk perception, the study demonstrates how constrained feasibility, institutional uncertainty, and threatened social continuity delimit households’ capacity to act, rendering risk practically secondary. The analysis is based on an exploratory sequential mixed methods design. Qualitative dimensions are tested through a field survey experiment, combining ordered logit modelling with a randomised gain–loss framing vignette under fixed risk and cost conditions. The findings show that seismic risk remains behaviourally dormant unless households perceive renewal as feasible, institutionally credible, and socially sustainable. Economic capacity emerges as a binding precondition for action, while trust in proximate implementing institutions conditions willingness independently of general state trust. Experimental results demonstrate that informational framing does not mobilise action in the presence of binding constraints. Gain framing increases willingness only among financially constrained households by reconfiguring feasibility, while loss framing fails to produce behavioural change. The article contributes to risk research by re-specifying the role of risk in collective decision-making. It introduces the concept of a risk action threshold, showing that risk becomes consequential only after agency constraints are relaxed. This perspective explains the systematic underperformance of awareness-based and nudge-oriented policies in urban risk governance and redirects attention from persuasion toward the institutional and material conditions that make risk actionable.