URBAN AGE
“City of
TABLE OF CONTENTS
[clicking on the topic headings below will take you directly to that section]
THE CONFERENCE [my personal
account of the Urban Age Conference itself]
HISTORY OF ISTANBUL (and Turkey) [my overview if the
history of the city and country]
Current
political situation [my analysis of the
current situation in Turkey and Istanbul]
HISTORY OF THE POST-WORLD WAR II URBAN DEVELOPMENT OF ISTANBUL [my attempt to trace the patterns and issues of urban development in modern Istanbul]
OUR TOURING ISTANBUL [a description of the places we toured—illustrated with photographs and liberally annotated]
Nancy
and I are back from the wonderfully successful Urban Age Conference in
On 2-3 November 2007, Urban Age held the first of its
second series of conferences—after the original series of six conferences which
began in New York in February 2005 and which culminated in Berlin in November
2006 (with Shanghai, London, Johannesburg, and Mexico City in between). The Endless City, a book
representing the integration of the findings of the first series of
conferences, was released by Phaidon Press in 2008. It was co-authored by Ricky Burdett and Deyan
Sudjic (member of the Urban Age team and author of The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--and Their
Architects--Shape the World, and many other books, and now Director of the
Design Museum in London).
Before the beginning of the Conference proper, there was a reception at Sakip Sabanci Museum at which the third annual Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award was presented. The speakers were Josef Ackermann (CEO of Deutsche
Bank), Kadir Topbaş (Mayor of
Istanbul), and Behiç Ak (a
cartoonist, architect, and author). The Award was given to the Bariş İçin Müsik (Music for Peace), a program in one of
In its long history,
The ethnic composition of
south—bisects the city into a European
half on the west and an Asian half to the east, making it the world’s only
metropolis located astride both continents.
The Sea or Marmara connects on its southeastern end, through the
Dardanelles, to the Aegean Sea, and thence to the 
and the rest of the Old City to its west),
and to the south of Karaköy (Galata)—has always been the most important,
protected, deep-water natural harbor on the Bosphorus. Throughout history, these factors have been
responsible for
With a fast-growing population of ~13 million, and an area
of 5,343 km2,
The
two days of the Conference proper began on 5 November Thursday. There was a boat from the Çirağan Palace
Hotel (where the international team was staying) to ferry people back and forth
on the Bosphorus to the conference site in Ortaköy, although many of us chose
instead the lovely ten minute walk.
The conference sessions took place in the strikingly beautiful Esma Sultan Yalisi in Ortaköy. The exterior of the building is the ruined remains of a brick palace that was built for Esma Sultan, sister of Sultan Abdülaziz, in 1875 by architect Sarkis Balyan. In 2001, Gökhan Avcioglu designed the unusual multi-purpose event space which was built within the ruins of the old palace. It consists of a glass and steel box, tethered to the exterior walls by suspension rods, which ensure that the structures remain equidistant from each other and therefore able to withstand the stresses of bad weather and earthquakes. It provided an exciting environment for the even more exciting conference taking place within it.
The
following descriptions represent my personal account of the presentations they
describe. They are in no way meant to be
exhaustive summaries, and they are probably not even all that accurate as
representations of what each participant said; rather they are my personal
recollection of the presentations. Many
of the speakers have articles about—or relating to—their presentations in the Urban
Age Conference Newspaper.
This Newspaper (which I most
highly recommend to you in any event, since it is an exceedingly rich source of
observations, data and, meaningful commentary on the situation in
DAY ONE – 5 NOVEMBER THURSDAY
The first day’s opening remarks began with a welcome from Wolfgang Nowak (Managing Director of
the Alfred Herrhausen Society). Josef
Ackermann (CEO of Deutsche Bank)
noted that Deutsche Bank was this year marking the 100th anniversary
of its operations in Turkey, and that London and Istanbul were Europe’s only
mega- global cities. He spoke about the
wonderful partnership between the Bank’s Herrhausen
Society and the LSE, and
included himself among the “addicts” who had become regular participants in the
Urban Age program, welcoming us to the conference along with our new Turkish
participants; and he mused about whether there was a connection between the
fact that the first of this series of conference’s having been in Mumbai and
this final one’s being in Istanbul might account for the fact that Turkish
Airlines was just now inaugurating the first non-stop service between Istanbul
and Mumbai. Howard Davies (Director of the London
School of Economics) offered his welcome and observations; and he was one
of the few during the conference to sound the important theme of corruption,
quoting an old Turkish adage (appropriately often used to in relation to the
process of government land distribution projects), “He who holds the honey pot is bound to lick his fingers.” Edoğan
Bayraktar (Executive Director of the
Introducing the
Urban Age
Ricky Burdett
gave an overview of the social and physical realities of cities in the 21st
Century: a world in which about 1/3 of
the population lives in slums, 
squalor,
and without basic resources; in which the development of urban form takes place
mostly through informal development, but where the much of the new formal
development takes place in forms like the dreadful public housing high-rise
towers of Shanghai (which tend to become vertical slums, as in Mumbai)—a form
that is very much a part of Istanbul’s recent development pattern; and in which
most of the areas of urban development are in locations of greatest risk for
flooding (e.g., the recent floods in
Istanbul itself)—a risk that is threatening to become much exacerbated by
climate change. The growth rates of the
major global cities from what existed in 1900 to what is predicted for 2020 is
staggering: while not as high as
Ben Page* (Chief
Executive, IPSOS MORI UK and Ireland, 
cities,
the younger the respondents were, the more satisfied they were with their
city. In
DAY I, SESSION I: Cities in the Global Context
Rethinking Cities in the Global Economy Co-Chairs: Howard Davies (Director,
LSE) and Şevket Pamuk, (Chair in
Contemporary Turkish
Studies, LSE)
Growth, Urbanization and Development.
Kemal Derviş (Vice-President and Director of Global Economy and Development Program, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. and Senior Advisor, Sabancı University, Istanbul) started by noting the World Bank finding that when a city reaches an urbanization rate of 45-60%, there follows a major acceleration of growth in that city, and then speculated whether the same principle might work for the world as a whole: given that the world’s urbanization has reached the 50% level, whether that doesn’t mean a similar massive inflection point in the acceleration of that growth. He noted that world wide GDP per capita had been essentially stagnant for centuries, but that since 1990 there had been a 25-fold increase (with it being an estimated 500 in 1000, an estimated 700 in 1600, ~800 in 1820, 1,800 in 1931, but 6,000 in 2001). In the 21st Century, emerging markets have been growing fast and becoming more important; but that the world’s growth is “lumpy”—with some regions catching up and some falling behind more. (Until the period between 1820 and 1913, regionally the growth had been essentially similar.) He said that, based on reasonably firm assumptions for 2010, and much more speculative ones for 2030 (e.g., that there will be a projected growth of 10-30%; that the annual growth rate for China+India will be ~7.5% [with China declining from its current 9-10% rate to 7-8%, but with India’s rate increasing more than expected], the emerging world ~5%, the advanced countries 2%), that he predicted the structure of the world’s economy (based on market prices) to follow the following GDP trajectory:
|
1990 |
2010 |
2030 |
|
|
18% |
19% |
24% |
Emerging |
|
3% |
12% |
24% |
|
|
78% |
67% |
49% |
Advanced |
|
1% |
2% |
3% |
Low Income |
Note
that this predicts that
American Metropolitan Cities in the
Post-Recession Period.
Bruce Katz (Vice-President and Director, Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings
Institution,
1.
a rebalancing of the economy in the direction of
becoming more export-oriented than consumption (the
2. a metro-led economy, with intense concentrations of people in relatively few places, based on all the things that foster cities and which cities encourage: innovation, human capital, infrastructure quality of place
3. realization of the potential of the national economy, in which the Federal government becomes a strategic, flexible, and accountable partner to cities
Bruce believes that Obama “gets it” at the paradigmatic level—that he can be the first “metro-president,” seeing metropolitan areas as being “vital engines of economic growth, innovation, and opportunity.” (from the White House website) He feels we need sustainable communities initiatives, linking housing, transportation, and jobs; the US needs to become less insular (Bruce wants to see the 21st Century as actually beginning with 2009—for good and hopeful reasons); and there need to be improvements in education, and early childhood reforms.
Financing Cities in the Global Economy
Ersin Aykuz (Country Head, Deutsche Bank,
These three presentations were followed by panel comments and discussion.
Jose Serra (Governor of the State of São Paulo) noted that São Paulo has a less leveraged real estate market, and that Brazil in general is faring better than the UK in the current recession; but that there is bad news for cities in many countries—that growth in the advanced market economies will be slower than in the emerging ones, but that Germany will be the exception to this in Europe.
Anthony Williams (Wm H. Bloomberg Lecturer in Public Management, Harvard Kennedy School
and Mayor of Washington, D.C., 1999-2007) raised some questions as a former
“practitioner”: How do we deal with these forces at the local level? What steps
need to be put in place in the real world?
To Kemal: What does all this say about the relationship between the
formal and informal economies? To Bruce: with the
Nasser Munjee, Chairman, Development Credit Bank,
Muhsin Mengütürk (Member of Board of
Directors,
Selahattin Yıldırım (Secretary General,
Ahmet Misbah Demircan, Mayor of Beyoğlu Municipality,
Istanbul) spoke about what he saw as the “real challenge” to a mega-city of
slums scattered about the landmarks: that roads need to be at least 18m wide,
and what they have is 5-6m. That in his
own district of Beyoğlu, they have smaller, narrow streets with no place
for parking. He proceeded to expound the
virtues of Law 5366, a 2005
ordinance which allows “regeneration through public/private partnership”: in this scheme, buildings can be taken from
their owners to be “renovated,” with new building being done to restore the
neighborhood, improving it while maintaining its original character; the
original owner is promised a new apartment or store “nearby”; and it is
described as being financed through 50-50 investment in ownership. In this way the older neighborhoods [and Law
5366 is particularly targeted at the poor communities in the historic districts
in and near the old city, although it can be applied to what few old, indigent
neighborhoods exist anywhere in the city—the most astounding fact we learned
about Istanbul is that of all the buildings in the city, only 7% were built before 1953] can be made more modern, with
newer buildings and a street plan that better accommodates cars, while
“preserving the original character of the buildings and the
neighborhood.”. [This is all made to
sound rather like historic preservation, until one realizes that what is being
discussed is at most preserving the
façades of some of the original
buildings, totally demolishing the structures and street plan, building
characterless large blocks, and simply re-attaching some of the original
façades to the lower floors along the new large block. As an aside, our friend Alex Garvin has
insisted that this form of building should be termed “façodomy”! It is made to sound like some kind of
community renewal, although as in many such programs, the effect—and perhaps
even the intent—is to destroy the existing neighborhoods and dislocate the
current inhabitants. Many of the original owners will not be able to afford the
50-50 financing—which, characteristically in Istanbul since the 80s, results in
half ownership of only 2/3, as 1/3 in such schemes has always gone to the
mayor—and therefore will not get what they appear to be being promised;
instead, the “nearby” replacement is likely for most to end up being one of the
ghastly high-rise projects on the city’s periphery. The well-heeled Mayor of Beyoğlu is the
first person I have actually considered throwing a shoe at! More about Law 5366 in my discussion of the
history of urbanization of
ties and Social Capital
Cities and Social Capital Co-Chairs: Tony Travers (Director,
Greater London Group, LSE) and Korel
Göymen (Professor, Faculty of
Arts and Social Sciences and Member of
Executive Committee,
Global Flows of Urban Change
Saskia Sassen* (Lynd Professor of Sociology and Committee on Global Thought, Columbia
University, New York—and long-time Urban Age participant) saw a series of
historical intersections for which Istanbul was the anchor, the platform; and
she saw its position at the intersection of economic and political geography to
be at the very heart of all this—causing Istanbul to be ranked (according to A
T Kearny’s 2009 study of 60 cities) as in the top ten in policy influence, top
15 in human capital (cities that act as a magnet for diverse groups of people
and talent), 35th in business activity. The city has a hugely international
population—a factor that weighs most heavily in New York City’s achieving the
number 1 status in the study overall.
The Changing Urban Context in
Joan Clos (Ambassador of Spain to Turkey and Mayor of Barcelona, 1997-2006) asserted that it was growth and
change that defined what is happening in Turkey’s cities, and that there was
not a comprehensive theory of cities as well-producing economic engines—that
economics alone does not explain the wealth of cities. He noted that
Çağlar Keyder* (Professor, Atatürk Institute for Modern
Turkish History,
These three presentations were followed by panel comments and discussion, which was amongst the most lively of the conference.
Dieter Läpple (Professor of Urban Economics, HafenCity University Hamburg—and long-time Urban Age participant) gave an impassioned, and much needed counterbalance to what had been said, noting that we are really dealing with two different models of urbanization and social capital. He pointed out that this city which had only 1 million inhabitants in 1950, had, in a half-century, become an entirely new city. Most importantly, he went after the fact that the true nature of the gecekondu was being ignored: they are not slums, but rather well-functioning informal communities with schools, healthcare, and successful social networks, which represent a bottom-up form of community organization—and that they represent an integrated, inclusive, and highly successful form of urbanization which had been virtually unaffected by the financial crisis. He summed it up by characterizing the negatives in the following phrase: “But you can’t park your car!” Dieter posed the real question as being how to reconcile this successful, populist development strategy with the new globalization.
Henk Ovink (Director, National Spatial
Planning, Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment, The Netherlands) noted that
Gerald Frug (Professor of Law, Harvard
University—and long-time Urban Age participant) spoke about democracy, and
asked to what extent control was in the hands of the city’s residents—that
while no one thinks they should have total control, is it true that they have
any voice at all? In this regard, he
raised a series of questions: 1) how
important is the policy of the central government, as opposed to that of the
local—and is the much applauded collapse of the two really a good thing? 2) there are 30-odd district managers in
İlhan Tekeli (Professor of City and Regional Planning,
Developed democracies have realized that it is no longer possible to
control urban development using modernist plans representing a city frozen in
time; instead strategic plans prepared through public participation and a
deliberative, democratic process direct a city’s growth. Implementation of
plans in
Nefise Bazoğlu (Former Chief, Monitoring Systems Branch,
UN-Habitat,
Saskia replied that she had not meant
to convey that
Şevket Pamuk noted that there was
little discussion of local agendas in elections, that it was only about nation
things. He said the public corporations
- municipal entities had no accountability; and, yes, developers have an
enormous amount of say. As for the
question of success: what exists, the
citizens feel good about, but it is not really based on any plan. The Neo-Liberal program was new in the 80s;
DAY I, SESSION II: Cities and
Cultures
Narratives of City Experience
Co-Chairs:
Deyan Sudjic* (Director,
Richard Sennett* (Professor of Sociology, LSE
and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology—and Urban Age founder) raised the question of whether we need to
take a view of what community means. The
left/center left position he said most of us adhere to celebrates community as
a family life, in which we understand and know each other—an intimacy based on
a bond with other people. He feels this
model is going out of date in the modern world, where the nuclear family has
fragmented (partly because we are living longer; partly because we are starting
families later in life), more people live alone; and that people feel less
bonded to each other. In his view, the
new community requires “bonding to strangers.”
Richard linked this to the
concept of “hinge cities” which he describes in his thought-provoking article
in the conference newspaper as being defined—as in
...the impermanence in time of…foreigners inhabiting a cosmopolitan space. They seldom stayed more than a few years.
Mutual ethnic tolerance thus rested on a lack of permanent identification with local life. The hinge city is a city of migrants rather than immigrants, a place of location rather than a destination, a city of mobilities. (from Conference Newspaper)
Social Narratives in Global Cities
Suketu Mehta (Author, Maximum City and Associate Professor, School of Journalism, New York University, New York—and long-time Urban Age participant) spoke about story telling—the role of narrative in all this. He spoke about the study commissioned by Mumbai, “A Vision of Mumbai” (done by what he marvelously described as, “those professional story-tellers, McKinsey & Company”!), which he described as being less a “vision” than a “hallucination.” He said that anywhere in the world, “slums” are the rich, multi-colored communities, and mass-produced housing is drab and monochromatic; the moral being, “Don’t demolish slums, improve them”: give them toilets, sanitation, water. The poor live where they want to be, and they have shaped their environment the way they want it. He also discussed the bifurcation in what goes under the rubric of “the news”: on the one hand, the banality of TV for the masses; on the other, specialized journalism for a diminishing class of educated consumer. He claimed that the role of the journalist is seen as to interpret to the masses what happens in the arcane halls of power; but that what journalists should do is to listen to the stories of the people.
The voice of Istanbul: who does a city
belong to?
Gündüz Vassaf (Author and Psychologist,
Dayan: Do the current residents still relate to this history?
Gündüz: All who come to this city become part of its history, even though the city keeps changing.
Dayan: It always seems that cities are about choices…
Richard: It is more in line with what Suketu was talking about: a city is a place with a specific set of feelings. The question is how to design places for people to inhabit.
Dayan: Architects are, themselves, primary storytellers.
Confronting History and Urban Change
Co-Chairs:
Ricky Burdett (Director, Urban Age, LSE)
and Asu Aksoy* (International Projects, Santral Istanbul and
Urban Culture in The Cities of the
Hashim Sarkis* (Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University) discussed the ideal of Mediterranean civilization and the concept of the Mediterranean city as the locus of several desires—Sea, Sun, and Sex—and differing geographic regions— East v. West, North v. South, sub-regions of Aegean and Adriatic, para-regions of Marmara and Black Sea; but mostly of differing historiographic conceptions: 1) as unifying geography over time (the panoramic—harbors with hills and encroaching hinterland, extended visibility, needs to embrace present and future as well); 2) as a cluster of micro-regions )strong connection to countryside; culture and agriculture all continuous); 3) as opposite interactive shores (cities and towns loosely connected with their hinterlands); 4) as an endangered ecology (shift of wood to stone; creator of public spaces). (The four are not completely compatible—some are diametrically different, as #2 and #3 with respect to relationship to hinterland; one may have to choose between them.)
The Spatial DNA of
İhsan Bilgin (Director, Architectural Design Programmed and Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Bilgi University, Istanbul)
began by explaining that there was no land ownership in any modern capitalist
sense (there were some rules for land use, but no concept of salable property)
until the 1930s, when the introduction of civil law turned land into a
commodity that could be bought and sold.
Istanbul retained its traditional structure until the end of WWII; in
the 50s there was an explosion of building of two groups: the first, which before the 50s (when the
population had been less than 1 million) had been primarily detached one- or
two-story houses, were demolished and replaced with big apartment buildings
(generally one building per block)—a process that was completed within two
decades; and the second, where single mansions had existed on large plots, the
were divisions into smaller lots. In the informal areas (the ones often with
farmers), fields were divided into smaller lots; if no family was using a field
before 1950, it meant it was the property of the state (like all the outskirts
of
Murat Güvenç* (Professor of City and Regional Planning, Architectural Design Master’s
Programmed, Bilgi University,
Istanbul) spoke about the concept of spatial DNA: matrices that guide the
reproduction of urban geography—either explicit (advantages and disadvantages
of geography, economy, state of art,
technology, market) or implicit (topology, and connectivity of history,
socially produced prestige, and value of space)—operating jointly, set limits
and conditions which allow and forbid, but do not require. It helps to understand urban growth
patterns. There are no ready-made tools
for examining. [His mappings were quite
interesting in terms of the geographic distribution of wealth in
These presentations were followed by panel comments and discussion.
Sophie Body-Gendrot (Director, Centre for Urban Studies, Universite Paris-Sorbonne) said we are mystified by a past, and the uncertainties of the future; history tends to magnify the lives of a powerful few. Certain things are directly transmitted; purposeful acts like Baron Haussmann’s grand boulevards, and the official rationales for their creation (the excuse of military access). Much is ephemeral; people follow jobs to where they are to be found. There is a need to explain decisions to the citizenry—it is as important as making those decisions; it gives residents a sense of inclusion and helps create a sense of hope.
Ayşe Öncü (Professor of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University, Istanbul) talked about tiptoeing around the identification of Istanbul and Islam—a delicate issue, not very directly discussed at the conference.
Murat Belge (Professor of Comparative Literature, Bilgi University, Istanbul) said that there were two attitudes, both about a history that never really existed: the first, started with the Republic—looking to the heartland of Anatolia to find the soul of the Turk, beginning history with Central Asia, rejecting the non-Turk or non-Islamic—during the last pre-modern military coup of the 80s, there was a boredom from the militaristic atmosphere (“tomorrow will be as dull as today”); the second, a nostalgic sense of what we have lost—a multi-cultural Istanbul, Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Georgian, etc.—realize you are a foreigner. Strange use of the word citizen: “Citizen, where are you from?”
Orhan Esen* (Historian and City-Guide,
Pelin Tan (Sociologist and Art Historian,
The
evening of 5 November Thursday was the occasion of the Urban Age Dinner. We boarded
a boat from the Çirağan Palace Hotel for a sail up the Bosphorus to
Yeniköy, a distance of some 15km. The
dinner took place at the sumptuous, late-19th Century mansion, the
Sait Halim Paşa Yalısı, in Yeniköy. (This was the residence of Sait Halim Pasa,
who was a Grand Vizier in the
DAY TWO – 6
NOVEMBER FRIDAY
DAY
II SESSION I: Environments and Cities
Climate Change and Cities Co-Chairs: Philipp Rode*, (Executive
Director, Urban Age, LSE) and Sibel
Sezer Eralp (Regional Director,
Black Sea and
Philipp Rode* began by noting that from an ecological perspective, climate change will alter everything; and cities are the engines of change, so they present a great possibility. Transportation is not the biggest producer of CO2 (only ~30%), but it matters very much, and it is among the top three issues of concern for residents and politicians alike. He also pointed out that automobiles present an issue of spatial consumption as well as of energy consumption.
Balancing Cars and Pedestrians: The Case of
Janette Sadik-Khan (Commissioner, New York City Department of
Transportation) gave a an exciting presentation of Bloomberg’s 2007 Plan
NYC and of her own work of pedestrianizing Broadway and other street areas in
New York and creating dedicated bicycle lanes in the City—and she described how
she has made the agency fast moving, making spaces usable overnight (with the
understanding that the capital programs will take years to catch up). Most promisingly, said that the
administration felt that there would be a significant opportunity to get
congestion pricing passed for the City in two years when the MTA is predicted
to run out of money. New Yorkers have
only 1/3 the carbon footprint of the
New Green Transport Infrastructure in
Geetam Tiwari (Chair and Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi) reported that Delhi, after realizing that in 1997 the pollution levels in the city constituted a form of “slow murder,” has gotten serious about improving CO2 emissions: in 20001, the city changed its bus fleet to the largest CNG fleet in the world, and by 2004 had won the Clean City Award. Geetam is championing Bus Rapid Transit (BRT—buses with dedicated lanes) as the answer for her city and elsewhere, as an economical, efficient form of transportation. With low infrastructure costs, BRT moves the buses out of the congestion, improving efficiency and reducing energy consumption.
City Transport and Time
Fabio Casiroli (Chairman and Founding Member, Systematica, Milan) cited some of the
lessons from transportation planning in Paris: the existing radial system
requires a series of circular connections to enable people in the outer area to
move from place to place without being forced to journey in and out of the
center each time to do so, and the current plan is for outer ring BRT lines
(perhaps to be replaced by rail lines, if very successful). Bogotá reduced travel time by 1/3 and reduced
emissions by 40% using BRT.
Patterns of Mobility for
Haluk Gerçek* (Professor, Transport Engineering Department, Istanbul Technical
University) said that Istanbul is a city of ~13 million, having 17.8% of
Turkey’s population, 16.5% of its employment, 22% of its GDP, and 26% of its
cars. There is a tremendous problem from
increased traffic congestion: although
average travel time in the city is down due to an increase in walking, motorized
travel time is up 20%, as is gas consumption.
between
1990 and 2007; and there are no official targets for reducing them. He said that the decision-making process on
all this is extremely controversial—and that it is still the government in
These four presentations were followed by panel comments and discussion.
Sanjeev Sanyal (President, Sustainable Planet Institute,
Dimitri Zenghelis (Senior Visiting Tutor, the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE and Chief Climate Economist, Cisco) said that the unique blend of diversity and innovation of cities positions them to be part of the solution, rather than just contributing to the climate change problem.
Hilmar von Lojewski (Program Manager, GTZ – German Technical
Cooperation,
Semih Eryıldız (Professor of Architecture and Urbanization,
Sonia Francine Gaspar
Marmo, (Deputy Mayor of Lapa,
Philipp: spoke to Janette about the disproportionate expenditures in NYC for walking and cycling
Janette: Walking and cycling are not expensive! We can re-purpose existing structures cheaply. But we also have to work to build public buy-in for projects.
Hilmar: People pick destinations they can walk to in order to avoid getting stuck in traffic. When cities grow in poly-centric ways, it makes this more possible.
Sanjeev: Walking is not a subject just for gigantic cities: most people live in smaller, more walk-able ones.
Dimitri: At the meeting in
Designing Sustainable Cities Co-Chairs: Andrew Altman (Chief
Executive, 2012 London Olympics Legacy Delivery Company and Deputy Mayor,
Architecture for Sustainable Cities:
Richard Rogers (Chairman,
Cheapness & Democracy
Alejandro Zaera Polo (Joint Director, Foreign Office Architects,
Politics for Sustainable Cities
Enrique Peñalosa (Mayor of Bogota, 1998-2001—and long-time Urban Age
participant) said that what we need to
work toward is social sustainability, equality in quality of life—equality
within democracy, in which public good will prevail over private interests; and
he pointed out that this is especially important with respect to children. Enrique (pictured at right) explained that it
is necessary that governments provide these things, as private interests will
not. Private property and market forces
do not work well for cities when it comes to land ownership: it almost always leads to low-density
development. “Traffic jams are the most
valuable tool to create density”: if
cities build more and bigger roads, they just get more cars and bigger suburbs;
the only solution is public transportation—and BRT, buses in exclusive lanes,
is the best version. The restriction of
access posed by the geography of
Andy: How do we intervene?
Richard: Private greed is eroding public responsibility. We need to understand what we want, short-term and long-term; we have to have agreement about where we are going.
Andy: Where does one start?
Enrique: The most valuable resource a city has is its street space—it is a treasure. The political issue is, how do we distribute this space?
DAY II
SESSION II:
Creating City Visions Co-Chairs: Ricky Burdett, Director, Urban Age, LSE, and Korhan Gümüş, Director, Urban and Architectural Projects, Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency
Setting a Vision for
Peter Bishop (Director, Design for
Andrew Altman (Chief Executive, 2012 London Olympics Legacy Delivery Company and
Deputy Mayor, Philadelphia, 2008 – 2009—long-time Urban Age participant and
Executive Board member), began by noting he has been successful in trying to
have a new job for each of the conferences.
Andy pointed out that there are moments in the lives of cities when
things come together to create opportunities, and the 2012 Olympics is one such
moment for
Masterplannig Istanbul
İbrahim Baz
(Director,
Ricky: How do private developers relate to all of
this?
Anthony Williams (Wm H. Bloomberg Lecturer in Public Management, Harvard Kennedy School and Mayor of Washington, D.C., 1999-2007): To make it a reality, there occasionally needs to be the exercise of authority over government and non-governmental realms—this needs to be done sparingly (consensus building is the usually preferable and always important main alternative), but it is at times necessary. It requires relentless focus on the part of a leader, and great management: “There is no distinction between vision and management.”
Ricky: Do you believe you should back a long-term
plan?
Tony Travers (Director, Greater London Group, LSE): One needs to try; but one needs also to concentrate on the short- and medium-term.
Erdoğan Yıldız (Representative, İstanbul Neighborhoods Association Platform) This
city has been presented on a golden plate to the upper class and the rich. Gypsies have been dispossessed; people are
treated like city furniture. To create
comfortable opportunities for the wealthy to live in the city, the less
well-to-do are told, “This is the value of your house,” are paid peanuts, then
what had been their property is re-sold at a high price. The people have no
voice; this is the real problem.
Ricky: Does
the master plan deal with these issues?
İbrahim: We are facing a big earthquake risk, and much of the housing is not in very safe condition even without an earthquake.
Ricky:
Aren’t you talking about something like 70% of the housing stock?
İbrahim: One has to consider: first,
[In
the statements from İbrahim,
the Director of the IMP, one can
hear all the prejudice against the slum dwellers and residents of the former
gecekondus: these are people whose
values are essentially rural, and therefore to be discounted. In the name of making the city more modern
(Law 5366) and of increasing earthquake protection,
Albert Speer (Managing Partner, Albert Speer and Partners Architects, Frankfurt am Main): we architects are only consultants to society; only responsible for ~5% of the picture. For the most part, architects just put things down on top of other places, without regard for the need to have a broader understanding of all the parts of society involved over time.
Tony:
Planners were experts, telling people what to do; we have now moved to a
much wider view of planning than ever before: how to cope with societal things
more generally. People who have successfully run cities know how to harness
developers, planners, et al., to
create a civic coalition. “
Ricky: OK,
without good politicians, we don’t get things done; but we just heard a
complaint about the lack of democratic participation and control. In
Andy: We
need to focus on “What do you want to accomplish,” and whose city is it?
Tony:
The Olympics was done by eminent domain—just sweeping things off the
site; it otherwise could not have happened.
Only politicians are in the position to do this. There is a tension between the great planner
Daniel Burnham’s famous dictum, “Make no little plan” and the kinds of “petits projets” we have been discussing.
Retrofitting
Cities Co-Chairs: Enrique Norten (Founder, TEN Arquitectos,
Hafencity
Kees Christianse* (Partner, Kees Christianse Architects and Planners, Rotterdam and
Professor of Architecture, ETH Zurich) discussed the concept of the open
city, using the Hamburg harbor city project as his model, as contrasted with
the traditional “city as tree”: spatially,
the latter employs separation, while the open city is multi-directional;
socially the latter is segregated, while the open city emphasizes co-existence;
and programmatically, the latter is
mono-functional, while the open city is diverse. We are not talking about a simply upgraded 19th
Century city. Structural vision as a
political covenant—an overall idea of how the city should be; reduces focus on
juridical plans (zoning, etc., is less meaningful because of the political
covenant between the stakeholders).
Retrofitting
Jose Castillo (Principal, Arquitectura 911 SC and Professor,
New Ideas for Retrofitting in
Ömer Kanıpak* (Founder, Arkitera Architectural Centre,
These three presentations were followed by panel comments and discussion.
Faruk
Göksu (Founding Partner, Urban
Strategy,
Melkan Gürsel Tabanlıoğlu (Partner, Tabanlıoğlu
Architecture,
Richard Brown (Programmed Director, 2012
Klaus Bode (Founding Partner, BDSP Partnership,
Richard Sennett (Professor of Sociology, LSE and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): Retrofitting an existing structure assumes that what exists can be repaired, and that it can be done by manageably small things. We should always prefer to retrofit; it assumes the people there are capable of recreating the space they inhabit. Infrastructure development, of course, often requires major surgery. In practice, regeneration—retrofitting—helps people make and sustain their own lives.
Closing
Remarks
Şevket Pamuk (Chair in Contemporary Turkish Studies, LSE) gave a beautifully
personal overview of
Wolfgang Nowak (Managing Director, Alfred Herrhausen Society) then gave some final remarks, thanked everyone, and brought the
proceedings to a close.
Informal
Closing Party
The evening of 6 November Friday was the occasion of the
Closing Party. We boarded the Swissotel
Boat from the Hotel through the ceremonial gate of the Çirağan Palace
HISTORY OF
[I put together the following
overview of the city’s long, important, and complex history for myself to help
me establish my bearings in time and in political reality so I could have a
better chance to understand
During the Ice Age, the Sea of
Marmara and the
From more historically-established
records, we know that the region of we now call
In
657 B.C., new Megarian colonists established themselves on the European side,
on the site of Lygos (on Saray Point).
Legend has it that King Byzas,
son of the god Poseidon and the nymph Keroesan (daughter of Zeus and Io)
founded this colony: told by the Delphic
Oracle to establish a colony “opposite the blind”—the meaning of which being
revealed when he sailed up the Bosphorus and saw “how blind” the colonists at
Chalcedon must have been not to have occupied the far superior opposite shore.
In
reality, the Golden Horn (the
estuary that separates Saray Point from the land to its north) is the best
natural harbor on the Bosphorus, located on one of the world’s most
historically important trade routes—and easily fortified from the high ground
on both sides of its mouth. Due to this
privileged position, it has always been able to control trade on the route and
charge tolls and harbor fees; and thus it has prospered mightily.
In
512 B.C., Emperor Darius of Persia
captured the town during his campaign against the Scythians; but, after the
retreat of the Persians in 478 B.C., the town came under the control of Athens; and it remained back and forth
in the sphere of Greek and Macedonian control for the next three
centuries—mostly, after 355 B.C., as an independent state.
Roman Control
In
the mid-2nd Century B.C.,
Rise of Constantinople as Capital of
the
In 324
A.D.,
At his
death in 337 A.D.,
The
Following
the death of Theodosius I in 395 and
the permanent partition of the Roman Empire between his two sons,
Constantinople became the capital of the Byzantine Empire (the eastern
Throughout
the 5th and 6th Centuries, while Europe was being sacked
by barbarians and was in general decline, the
For centuries after the end of
Justinian’s reign, the Empire struggled to keep invaders at bay. There were assaults from the Persians, the Bulgarians, and a series of attacks from the growing Islamic
empire. Religiously (politically?), there was the
great Iconoclastic Crisis—ostensibly
over the veneration of icons—which began in 726 when Leo III attempted to “rid
the Empire of all forms of idolatry,” and which ultimately in 1054 resulted in
the Pope’s severing all remaining ties between Byzantium and the West. Distracted by this religiously couched
infighting, the Byzantines were unprepared for the onslaught of the Turkish
threat from the East. The Byzantines
were disastrously defeated in 1071 by the Seljuk Turks, who soon established control over Anatolia,
with their capital at Nicea
(İznik), and later established
the Sultanate of Rûm (“Rûm” coming from the Arabic word for the
Roman Empire) at Konya. Meanwhile, Venice
A Crusade—in this case, the Fourth; using, as was often the case, the supposed mission of recapturing the
Holy Land from the Infidels as a pretext, actually was more focused on
pillaging and interfering in regional politics along the way—allied itself with
Venice (and its merchants, whose
eyes were on the riches of the eastern trade routes). Led by Enrico Dandolo, the Doge of Venice, the Crusaders sacked and plundered Constantinople in 1204, creating the Latin Empire of the East, and causing the citizens of Constantinople
to flee east to set up a small empire at Nicea. The Byzantines
retook Constantinople in 1261, ending the
brief Latin Empire, but their territory was drastically diminished. By
1450, the Byzantine Empire controlled little other than Constantinople
itself.
The Ottoman Empire
With the demise of the Seljuk Sultanate of
Rûm (ca. 1300), Turkish Anatolia
was divided into a patchwork of independent states, the so-called Ghazi
emirates. At that time, the weakened Byzantine Empire had lost most of its Anatolian provinces
to the Ghazi emirates. One of these Ghazi emirates was led by Osman I (the son of a Turkish warlord named Ertuğrul) who inherited control of his father’s small
territory and proceeded to extend the frontiers of Ottoman settlement towards
the edge of the Byzantine Empire . Osman’s followers became known in the Empire
as Osmanlıs, and in the
West as the Ottomans. Under Osman’s successors, the Ottomans
continued to grow in power and size.
As Pete Goldman writes in “The Turks: A Historical Overview,” (in The Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600, ed. David J. Roxbury [Royal
Academy of the Arts, London
On 29 May 1453 Constantinople fell to the 21-year-old Ottoman ruler Mehmed II, henceforth ‘Fatih Mehmed’—‘Mehmed the Conqueror’ (r.1444-46,1451-81).
Mehmed, born most probably of a slave mother…was the third son of Murad II (r.1421-44, 1446-51), a ruler who had been
victorious over Christian and Muslim foes alike. Murad II had brought Mehmed to the rulership
at age twelve, trusting that able advisors would manage affairs and that he
could cast a benevolent eye from afar should difficulties arise. The youngster’s failure to deal with
competing court factions, Balkan rebellions, and Hungarian threats brought
Murad out of retirement. Regaining power
in 1451, Mehmed, anxious to prove himself, staked everything on success at Constantinople .
His 100,000 troops, huge cannons and large fleet overwhelmed the city’s
7,000 defenders.
A mere shell of its former imperial splendor but still a potent symbol of
universal rule, Constantinople was rebuilt and
populated with Muslims, Christians and Jews.
Mehmed’s successors would adopt the mantles of caesar, ghāzī and khan. While the claims to the Roman-Byzantine
legacy could be made by right of conquest, the other titles, those of ghāzī (‘Islamic fighter for
the faith’) and khan (ruler of the
steppe world whence the Turks derived), are more complex. What lay behind these claims? What was the ethnic, political and cultural
baggage that Mehmed brought with him to the walls of Constantinople ? What were Ottoman origins?
These are complicated questions raised by
Golden. He quotes a source from a period close to Mehmed II’s rule claiming,
the Ottomans “were descended from shepherds of Tartary of the race of one
called Ogus”[; further adding] that their ancestor, an “Ogus” peasant, having
bested a Byzantine champion in combat, was rewarded with the territory of
“Ottomanzich” (probably to be identified with the town Osmancık in
northern Turkey, “from which his descendents took their family name of
Ottoman.” The account, despite its
fanciful elements, points in certain directions. The ancestors of the Ottomans of Mehmed’s day
were of diverse origins, but at least in part, came from “Tartary,” the
turko-Mongolian steppe world of Inner Asia.
“Ogus” refers to the Oghuz, a medieval Turkic tribal confederation of
the steppes that gave rise to the Seljuks, among others. After 1071, Oghuz tribes spearheaded the
conquest of Anatolia , which became the base of
the Seljuk sultanate of Rûm.
Post-conquest Ottoman accounts…mention the service of Mehmed’s ancestor,
Ertoghrul, to cAla’ al-Din Kay Qubad, seeking legitimation in Seljuk ties.
He further points out that,
The Turkic languages–Turkish, Tatar, Kazahk,
Uzbek and others—spoken from Siberia and
Xinjiang to the Near East and Balkans, belong to the Altaic ‘family.’ The latter includes Mongolic, Manch-Tungusic
and , perhaps more distantly, Korean and Japanese. …Manchuria
appears to be the ancient homeland of these languages, except for the Turkic
group…[which] was probably found in adjoining areas in Mongolia and Siberia.
Golden notes that, “The collapse of the
Northern Wei (386-534), a dynasty that ruled northern China Iran
and Constantinople .” As for the question of the Türks becoming Muslim,
Golden writes, “The latter half of the
tenth century was marked by…mass conversions to Islam.” Eventually, by the12th
Century, the majority of the Oghuz were Islamized to one degree or another.
Even though many Turkic peoples became Muslims under the influence of Sufis, often of Shī’ah persuasion, most Turkic people today are Sunni Muslims. These include the
majority of Balkan Turks, Balkars, Bashkorts, Crimean Tatars, Karachay, Kazaks,
Kumuk, Kyrgyz, Nogay, Tatars (Kazan Tatars), Turkmens, Turks of Turkey, Uygurs,
and Uzbeks. The Azerbaijanis of the Republic of Azerbaijan and Iranian Azerbaijan are the only major
Turkic-speaking people that traditionally adhere to the Shī‘ah sect of Islam. The Qashqay nomads and Khorasani Turks as well as various Turkic tribes spread across
Iran Turkey
The
Empire prospered under the rule of a line of committed and effective sultans: Selim I (1512–1520)
dramatically expanded the Empire's eastern and southern frontiers and established
Ottoman rule in Egypt and naval presence in the Red Sea; and Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566) conquered Belgrade and southern Hungary and
other Central European territories—going as far as the gates of Vienna, which
was unsuccessfully besieged in 1529—and taking control of Transylvania,
Wallachia and, intermittently, Moldavia, taking Baghdad 1535, and gaining
control of Mesopotamia and naval access to the Persian Gulf. By the end of
Süleyman's reign, the Empire's population reached about 15,000,000. The
Empire had become a dominant naval force, controlling much of the Mediterranean Sea—with
victories over Christian navies leading to the conquest of Tunis and Algeria
from Spain, the capture of Nice
from the Holy Roman Empire in 1543, and the evacuation
of Muslims
and Jews
from Spain to the safety of Ottoman lands during the Spanish Inquisition.
At the
height of its power in the 16th–17th Centuries, the
Ottoman Empire spanned three continents, controlling much of Southeastern
Europe, Western Asia and
Decline and
attempts at Reform
The Empire remained
a major expansionist power until, in May 1683, Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha led a
huge Ottoman army to lay siege to
During this period,
the Empire faced challenges in defending itself against foreign invasion and
occupation. The Empire ceased to enter conflicts on its own and began to forge
alliances with European countries. As an example, in the 1853 Crimean War, the Ottomans united with
the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
The long period of
Ottoman stagnation is typically characterized by historians as an era of failed
reforms—but also as an era of modernization.
Whereas Ottoman science and technology had been highly advanced in
medieval times (as the result of Ottoman scholars' synthesis of classical
learning with Islamic philosophy and mathematics, and knowledge of such Chinese
advances in technology as gunpowder and the magnetic compass), by this period
these areas had become regressive and conservative, and Europe was well ahead
of Turkey in politics, technology, science, banking, commerce and military
development. Selim III (1789–1807) made the first attempts to modernize along
European lines, including Ottoman major efforts to reform the military. These efforts, however, were hampered by
reactionary movements, partly from the religious leadership, but primarily from
the Janissary corps.
The Janissaries (from “Yeniçeri,” meaning “new soldier”) were a force
which had been created by the Sultan Murad
I, mostly from male Christian children (preferably aged 14-18), levied
through the devşirme system
from conquered Christian countries (originally Greeks and Albanians, later
Bulgarians, Armenians, Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, and later still, Romanians,
Georgians, Poles, Ukrainians, southern Russians, and Black Africans) in the 14th Century.
They became the Ottoman standing army, an unusual thing in the world at
that time; and the Janissaries were far more effective as a fighting force
because of their intense loyalty and high morale—due to the fact that they were
paid regular and generous cash salaries by the Sultan himself, were provided
with an amazing level of logistical support, comfort, and medical care, and
were forbidden to marry, and therefore unable to establish family or dynastic
loyalties of their own. The Janissaries
began enrolling outside the devşirme system during the reign of Sultan Murad III (1546-1595), and abandoned
devşirme recruitment completely during the 17th Century, after
which they enrolled volunteers, mostly of Muslim origin. As Janissaries became aware of their own
importance, they began to desire a better life. By the early 17th Century, Janissaries had such prestige and
influence that they dominated the government:
they could mutiny and dictate policy and hinder efforts to modernize the
army structure; they could change Sultans as they wished through palace coups;
they made themselves landholders and tradesmen; and, most significantly, in
1566, Sultan Selim II was forced to
give the janissaries permission to marry—undermining
their loyalty to the dynasty. There were
many Janissary revolts, often in reaction to attempts to reform their corps,
which had become anarchic and ineffectual.
A major attempt by Selim III
to modernize the army along Western European lines led in 1807 to a Janissary
revolt in which he was deposed and killed.
By 1826, his
successor, Mahmud II, informed the
Janissaries that he was forming a new army, organized and trained along modern
European lines. In a way that almost
certainly had been calculated by the Sultan, the Janissaries mutinied and
advanced on the sultan's palace. In the
fighting that followed, the Janissary barracks were destroyed by artillery
fire, resulting in 4,000 Janissary fatalities; and the survivors were either
exiled or executed, and their possessions were confiscated by the Sultan, in
what is called the Auspicious Incident.
The last of the Janissaries were then put to death by decapitation.
In 1839, Mahmud II started the modernization of
Turkey by issuing the Edict of Tanzimat
(Tanzîmât, meaning
“reorganization”), which had
profound Europeanizing effects on the style of clothing, architecture,
education, and land reform, and which led to a modern conscripted army, banking
system reforms, and the replacement of the old guild system with modern
factories. In 1856, Sultan Abdülmecid issued the Imperial Reform Edict (Hatt-ı
Hümayun), which promised equality in education, government appointments,
and administration of justice to all Ottoman citizens, regardless of their
ethnicity or religion. Unfortunately,
the Tanzimat Reforms proved too late
to reverse the nationalistic and secessionist trends that had already been set
in motion since the early 19th century
Ethnic
nationalism
Nationalism was a
rising force in many countries during the 19th Century, and it began
to have profound effects on the
The Ottoman state’s
ability effectively to deal with ethnic uprisings was severely
compromised. As the sultan’s empire
broke up, the European powers hovered in readiness to colonize or annex the
pieces. They used religion as a reason for pressure or control, saying that it
was their duty to protect the sultan’s Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox
subjects from misrule and anarchy. For
example, the Russian emperors put pressure on the Turks to grant them powers
over all Ottoman Orthodox Christian subjects, whom the Russian emperor would
thus ‘protect’. The result was the Crimean
War (1853–56), with
Economically, the
Empire had difficulty in repaying the Ottoman public debt to European banks.
Despite the increasing economic difficulties, the sultan continued the imperial
building tradition. The vast
By the end of the
19th century, however, the main reason the Empire was not entirely overrun by
Western powers came from the Balance of Power doctrine: both Austria and Russia wanted to increase
their spheres of influence and territory at the expense of the Ottoman Empire,
but they were kept in check mainly by the United Kingdom, which feared Russian
dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Abdül Hamit II & the Young Turks
Amid the empire’s
internal turmoil, Abdül Hamit II (r
1876–1909) assumed the throne. Mithat
Paşa, a successful general and powerful grand vizier, managed to
introduce a constitution at the same time, but soon the new sultan did away
both with Mithat Paşa and the constitution, and established his own
absolute rule. Abdül Hamit modernized
without democratizing, building thousands of kilometers of railways and
telegraph lines, and encouraging modern industry. However, the empire continued
to disintegrate, and there were further nationalist insurrections.
The younger
generation of the Turkish elite—particularly in the military—watched bitterly
as their country fell apart. They reacted by organizing secret societies
devoted to toppling the sultan. This era is dominated by the politics of the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihâd ve Terakkî Cemiyeti), and the movement
that would become known as the Young Turks
(Jön Türkler). The Young
Turk Revolution of 3 July 1908 forced the restoration of the 1876 constitution.
In 1909 the Young Turk-led Ottoman parliament deposed Abdül Hamit and put his
weak brother Mehmed V on the
throne. The Young Turk government had signed
a secret treaty establishing the Ottoman-German
Alliance in August 1914, aimed against the common Russian enemy, but
aligning the Empire with the German side.
When WWI broke out, the
Ottoman parliament and sultan made the fatal error of siding with Germany and
the Central Powers—although, in reality, they were left little choice but to do
this, given the long history of their alliances against Russia. Donald
Quataert, in The Ottoman Empire:
1700-1922 (Cambridge, 2005), has claimed that what has been described as a
“paranoid style in twentieth-century Soviet politics” is very much attributable
to Russia’s history of endless conflict with the Ottoman Empire:
For the Czarist Russian state based in
Although the
|
|
With the defeat of
Under the terms of
the Treaty of Sèvres, the
partitioning of the
The Republic
The situation looked
very bleak for the Turks as their armies were being disbanded and their country
was taken under the control of the Allies.
Nevertheless, what at first seemed to be a catastrophe actually provided
the impetus for rebirth.
Since gaining
independence in 1831, the Greeks had
entertained the Megali Idea (Great
Plan) of a new Greek empire encompassing all the lands that had once had Greek
influence – in effect, the reestablishment of the Byzantine Empire, with
Constantinople as its capital. On 15 May 1919, with Western backing, Greek
armies invaded
Even before the Greek invasion, an Ottoman general named Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), the hero of
the WWI battle of Gallipoli, had decided that a new government must take over
the destiny of the Turks from the ineffectual sultan. He began organizing
resistance to the sultan’s captive government on 19 May 1919.
The Turkish War of
On 24 July 1923, the Turkish
revolutionaries forced the Allies to abandon
the Treaty of Sèvres and negotiate
the Treaty of Lausanne, leaving Anatolia and
Mustafa Kemal, the nation’s triumphant hero, was proclaimed Atatürk (“Father Turk”) by the Turkish parliament. In a move to distance himself and the
Republic from the imperial memories of
Atatürk had always been ill at ease with Islamic
traditions and he set about making the
Atatürk died in İstanbul in 1938, just before WWII
broke out, and was succeeded as president by İnönü. Earlier, he had
served as the Prime Minister of
The Post World War II Years
Surhan Cam has written, “ Although Mustafa Kemal
proclaimed a secular republic at the end of the Great War, he also became
bogged down in monopolizing the reins of power through the single party rule of
the center-left Republican People’s
Party until his death at the outset of World War II.” (“Institutional
Oppression and Neo-Liberalism in
At the end of WWII,
the Allies made it clear that they believed that
In 1950, Inönü’s party lost the first free elections in Turkish
history. The first opposition party in
Turkey’s history—the Democratic Party, led by Celal Bayar and Adnan Menderes—won the first of these elections in 1950 with a huge majority (408
seats went to the Democratic
Party and
only 69 to the Republican
People’s Party,
breaking its unbroken dominance since the founding of the republic); and the Republican People’s Party retained the mandate in the elections of 1955, increasing
its parliamentary majority. (İnönü served for ten years as the
leader of the opposition.) As expected, the
In 1960, the military staged a coup
against the
Even though the
opposition was imprisoned during the 1961 elections, Inönü still did not win a majority and had to form coalition
governments. (Eventually in 1972, Inönü
lost his party's leadership race to Bülent
Ecevit.) New elections were held in 1963 and a government was formed. This government and ensuing administrations
(eventually the Justice Party, a
moderate descendent of the Democratic
Party, led by Süleyman Demirel, who formed a coalition government in 1965, and became its Prime
Minister) were dogged by corruption charges and claims of
constitutional violations. The Justice Party attracted
support from the business community and from artisans and shopkeepers, but its
real strength lay in the peasantry and in the large number of workers who had
recently arrived in the cities from the countryside: although it never disavowed the principle of
secularism enshrined in Kemalism, the Justice Party promoted the open
expression of the traditional Islam
that appealed to many in these latter groups. In the 1969
general election, both major parties lost votes; but right-of-center
parties, led by the Justice Party,
outpolled the Republican
People’s Party and the small left-wing parties by nearly two to
one, and the Justice
Party was
able to increase its Grand National Assembly majority by sixteen seats. To some
observers, the election results indicated a polarization of Turkish politics
that would pull the Justice Party
and Republican
People’s Party in opposite directions and aggravate political
extremism.
In 1970, the military staged another coup. According to
Despite the objections of Republican People’s Party
cadres, the military also arrested sympathizers of a so-called ‘National Democratic Revolution’ that
sought to promote an ‘anti-imperialist Kemalism.’ The National Democratic Revolution’s
supporters, especially those in bureaucratic positions, were not ‘compatible’
with a ‘technocrat cabinet’ assigned by the military until the 1973 elections
in order to make structural adjustments to the economy for the implementation
of the low tariff prescriptions of the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development]. Students of the National Democratic
Revolution doctrine argued that reductions in trade quotas would undermine the
independence of industrial development.
Notably, imports had increased from a 7% annual average of GDP in the
1960s to 14% in 1978, the year that saw
the initial acceptance of a neo-liberal program. Intermediate goods [goods used as input in
the production of other goods, such as partly finished good—used in production
of final goods; in the production process, intermediate goods either become
part of the final product or are changed beyond recognition in the process—and
therefore not counted in a country's GDP, as that would mean double counting,
as only the final product should be counted; the term can be misleading, since in advanced
economies, about half of the value of intermediate inputs consist of services]
were responsible for 90% of this rise, forging ahead a ‘montage industry.’ (ibid.,
pp. 3f)
Leftist
intellectuals were disillusioned by the 1970 coup, and began to distance
themselves from the military. They made
increasing overtures to the rapidly increasing working class. Under the leadership of these intellectuals,
a left wing trade union confederation
(DISK) was formed in the 70s to
counterbalance the power of the Association
of Businessmen (TUSIAD). According to
real wages surged by half, and the share of the bottom
quartile in national income doubled to 5.7%.
When these occurrences are considered along with the abandonment of
totalitarian monarchism for a republican and secular state and then the introduction
of multi-party elections, it would be fair to refer to a democratizing process
in Turkey from the end of the Great War to the 1970s, albeit not an easy
one. Such a process, however, was
encroached upon by institutional repression in conjunction with the
introduction of neo-liberalism. (ibid., p. 5)
The global conditions of the 1970s made
In 1972, Mustafa Bülent Ecevit
succeeded İnönü as the leader of the center-left Republic People’s Party and became Prime Minister in a coalition with the pro-Islamic National Salvation Party of Necmettin Erbakan. An anti-Western stance grew in
The tensions between the extreme right and
far left factions in the country became increasingly polarized. Starting in 1978, the growing pressure to
adopt the principles of neo-liberalism
was countered by strong resistance from labor and protectionist capital. What ensued was what
In 1983,
the military permitted national
elections (perhaps, in part, due to the fact that in 1982
In 1987, Mustafa Bülent Ecevit became the chairman of the Democratic Left Party. The party failed to enter the National Assembly
at the 1987 national elections, and in spite of passing the electoral barrier
in 1991 managed to win only 7 seats in parliament. The Democratic Left Party's fortunes changed after the 1995 elections, when the party won 75
seats (out of 550). After two short-lived governments (formed by the Motherland Party’s Mesut Yılmaz and the
Welfare Party’s Necmettin Erbakan),
Ecevit became a deputy prime
minister in the last government of Mesut
Yılmaz. (Yılmaz made the Motherland
Party more business-friendly and Europe-oriented, causing the more
conservative, religious wing of the Motherland
Party to switch to the Welfare Party
of Necmettin Erbakan.)
The Welfare Party (Refah) was a right wing
Islamist political party, which had been founded by Ahmed Tekdal in
The coalition
government of Erbakan was forced out of power by the Turkish military in 1997 (warned that if it did not resign, it would face a military
coup), on the grounds of its having an Islamist
agenda. In 1998 the Welfare Party
was banned for violating the principle of secularism in the
constitution. In
[The saga of the AKP figures so crucially in the questions about the current political situation
in
And, finally, a
brief summary of
[This section
builds directly on the latter part of my section on “History of Istanbul (And Turkey),”
q.v., ]
Before I went to
The Basic Situation
The constitution vests executive
authority in the president, who
is the designated head of state, and
who is elected
every five years by the Grand
National Assembly. The president does not have to be a member of
parliament. The current president, Abdullah
Gül, was elected by parliament on 28 August 2007. Executive power rests with the prime
minister and the council of
ministers. The prime minister is appointed
by the president from among the elected deputies of the National Assembly
(in practice, the president asks the head
of the party with the largest number of deputies to form a government) and is elected by the parliament through a
vote of confidence in his government. The prime minister is Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan, whose Islamic conservative AKP first won a majority of parliamentary seats in the 2002
general elections. The
council of ministers, or cabinet, is headed by the prime minister who then nominates ministers for appointment by the president, who
then must receive a vote of confidence from the full assembly. The
ministers don't have to be members of Parliament. The Chairman
of the Parliament is Köksal Toptan,
from the AKP. The current president of the
Since Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) founded the modern Republic
of Turkey in 1923, the Turkish military has perceived itself
as the guardian of Kemalism (the
official state ideology—even though Atatürk himself insisted on separating the
military from politics) and especially as the guardian of the secular nature of the republic. The military
has been an important force in
|
November 3, 2002
General Election Results - |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Registered Electors |
41,407,027 |
|
|
|
Voters |
32,768,161 |
79.1% |
|
|
Valid Votes |
31,528,783 |
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Party |
Votes |
% |
Seats |
|
|
|||
|
Justice and Development Party
(AKP) |
10,808,229 |
34.3 |
363 |
|
Republican People's Party
(CHP) |
6,113,352 |
19.4 |
178 |
|
Independents |
314,251 |
1.0 |
9 |
|
True Path Party (DYP) |
3,008,942 |
9.5 |
0 |
|
Nationalist Action Party
(MHP) |
2,635,787 |
8.4 |
0 |
|
Young Party (GP) |
2,285,598 |
7.2 |
0 |
|
Democratic People's Party (DEHAP) |
1,960,660 |
6.2 |
0 |
|
Motherland Party (ANAP) |
1,618,465 |
5.1 |
0 |
|
Felicity Party (SP) |
785,489 |
2.5 |
0 |
|
Democratic Left Party (DSP) |
384,009 |
1.2 |
0 |
|
Others |
1,614,001 |
5.1 |
0 |
|
|
|||
The AKP (the Justice and Development Party) was new to the political scene at
the beginning of the 21st Century.
It was established mostly by former members of the Virtue Party,
which was itself the inheritor an
unbroken political Islamist tradition—from
the National View
to the National Order Party, to the National Salvation Party, to the Welfare Party—all parties essentially
banned from the political process for violating the secularism of the
|
July 22, 2007 General
Election Results - |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Registered
Electors |
42,799,303 |
|
|
|
Voters |
36,056,293 |
84.2% |
|
|
Valid
Votes |
35,049,691 |
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Party |
Votes |
% |
Seats |
|
|
|||
|
Justice and
Development Party (AKP) |
16,327,291 |
46.6 |
341 |
|
Republican
People's Party (CHP) |
7,317,808 |
20.9 |
112 |
|
Nationalist
Action Party (MHP) |
5,001,869 |
14.3 |
70 |
|
Independents |
|||