There are 26 neighbourhoods in Altındağ District:[5] Located just outside the city centre, (beyond the district of Ulus as far as the large Altınpark), this hillside has long been home to the workers in the city of Ankara but Altındağ remains one of the poorer quarters of the capital.

The hillside is covered with illegally built gecekondu housing, home to low-income families.

With this architectural heritage, Altındağ is a member of the Norwich-based European Association of Historic Towns and Regions.

[6] Altındağ includes parts of the historic city of Ankara, as well as the first National Assembly in which Republic of Turkey was founded is in Ulus.

Altındağ was the location of one of the first gecekondu developments in Turkey, when in the 1950s and 1960s people illegally built small, one-bedroom houses on small plots of land; then in the 1970s and 1980s these plots of land were made legal through amnesty legislation, and eventually sold to developers who replaced these shacks with larger, multi-story apartment buildings.