Cities are complicated and dynamic structures. Urban agenda has changed constantly. Urban planning has to follow and reshape this dynamism as a return. Cities are under constant restructuring with parallel to spatial, economic, social and political conditions. In recent years, urban transformation has become turning point in planning system and occupied dominant role as a policy tool in Turkish context. Urban transformation has come to the planning agenda as an indispensable policy tool. Especially in the last two decades, urban transformation projects became a tool of spatial restructuring processes and solving major problems such as illegal housing, disaster risk, and uncontrolled urban sprawl. Moreover, with the generalization and reinterpretation of the context of transformation caused conceptual and practical confusion. The implementation of the urban transformation projects is taken place almost in all Turkish cities; however, it has felt more in big metropolitan cities as in the case of first Istanbul and then Ankara. The city of İzmir, seems to be subjected to all these discussions. This study first discusses the urban transformation concept as a tool of planning, by clarifying its principles on a global scale. After, it evaluates Turkey’s performance on a holistic approach, which means all interventions that caused transformation at the citywide level in the case of İzmir central areas. The analysis has conducted using multidimensional spatial data in GIS database in relation to general policies and legislation. All urban transformations projects in İzmir have digitalized geographically on a map to evaluate their location and attributes in relation to urban plans. As a result of these analyses, it has been concluded that despite the urban transformation concept was proposed as a solution to problems of the cities, it has evolved into a new problematic because of fragmented and speculative rent seeking activities or ineffective applications. The study aims to highlight these deficiencies and offer solutions.