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 |
1,835,486 |
5.2 |
26 |
|
Democrat Party
(DP) |
1,898,873 |
5.4 |
0 |
|
Young Party
(GP) |
1,064,871 |
3.0 |
0 |
|
Felicity Party
(SP) |
820,289 |
2.3 |
0 |
|
Others |
783,204 |
2.2 |
0 |
|
|
|||
In the elections of 2007, the AKP scored an even greater victory,
garnering an impressive 46.6% of the votes cast. Due to the fact that there was a third party
(Nationalist Action Party) that made
it over the 10% electoral threshold, this victory actually resulted in 21 fewer seats in the parliament than in
2002. [at right. Both sets of election
results are from http://electionresources.org/tr/.]
Western countries
such as the
The Conflict between the AKP and the Military
Under the banner of
meeting EU's political demands for
starting membership negotiations (the 1993
Copenhagen criteria, requiring that a state have the institutions to
preserve democratic governance and human rights, have a functioning market
economy, and accept the obligations and intent of the EU), Turkey, under AKP
leadership, passed a number of reforms
aiming at strengthening civil control
over the military, focused mainly on reducing the military’s control of the
National Security Council (NSC), and diminishing the power of the NSC to control important government
actions in the country. Passed by the
Grand National Assembly on 23 July 2003, these measures are known as the “seventh reform package,” and are viewed
as clearly being a major assault by the AKP on the military.
During the rule of
the AKP,
Upon being indicted,
the AKP government struck back
forcefully: it made multiple arrests in the secular population; on 5 August 2008,
President Abdullah Gul assigned 21 new deans to all government
Universities, all of whom reported to support the end to the headscarf
ban; on 9 August 2008, Edibe Sozen, an AKP parliament member,
proposed establishing a prayer section
in all schools, and a series of
anti-pornography rules. (In 2004, Muammer Guler, the mayor of
In the court verdict of 30 July
2008, the AKP was found guilty of becoming the focus of anti-secularist actions; but the court
fell one vote short in the move to disband the party (a qualified majority of seven votes out of the eleven members of the Court
is required to disband a political party, and only six voted in favor of
disbanding the AKP, thus falling
short by one vote), and thus the Court did
not ban the AKP.
The
The AKP
made its move on the power and control of the military—which have been at least moderately successful; and the
military made its attempt to outlaw the AKP—which
narrowly failed in the courts last year.
The struggle is continuing, with the AKP government actually currently
succeeding in bringing a general in the army to stand trial in a civilian court
(unheard of in Turkish history—and unusual for any place in the world) in the
incredibly charged Ergenekon case (q.v., below), and with the ever-present
sense of the possibility that the military may actually intervene at some point
through the exercise of direct force—as they have often enough in the past.
From afar,
it had appeared to me that the AKP was, not unlike the Republican Party in the
On closer
examination, it still seems clear that the AKP does openly support an
increasingly Islamic Turkish society—and all the evidence supports the idea
that covertly it supports an even more extreme, fundamentalist shift in that
direction; and that the party’s intentions are to be anything but restrained in
pursuing this. The outward signs of this
shift are everywhere to be seen in Istanbul:
it is most visible in the significant increase in the ubiquity of the headscarf—and it was described to us
that the last several years could be characterized by the headscarf inching its
way forward on the heads of the women of Istanbul (moving from the stylish
gesture at the custom by covering the back portion of the head, and
progressively approaching the more devout adoption of the covering of the
complete head, and even working its way down women’s foreheads); flying in the
face on the Republic’s long-standing ban on wearing the headscarf in public
institutions, the AKP has been promising to remove the ban on it in the
universities, and the wife of the country’s president, Abdullah Gül, has appeared at state functions wearing one; and now,
in certain neighborhoods, one sees groups of women veiled from head to toe in
black, completely covered except for a narrow opening for their eyes—a style we
are told was unheard of in the City only a few years ago.
What I was
completely unprepared to learn, however, was that the left in
For a while,
I felt I had gotten the situation completely wrong. Then, thinking much more about it and
discussing it with numerous knowledgeable friends upon my return home, I came
to yet another understanding. I believe
that the left in
Two Recent Articles in
the New York Times which Highlight
the Problems
In the past
week, two unrelated articles about
Gay Honor
Killing
The more recent article (27 November; click here
for the full text), “Soul-Searching in
Turkey After a Gay Man Is Killed,” by Dan
Bilefsky, recounts the murder of an openly gay 26 year old man who was
killed by his father in Üsküdar (a
neighborhood in which secular and religious Turks
live closely side by side that we visited on the Asian side of Istanbul [q.v., my section on “Our Touring Istanbul”]) in what is being described as the “first gay honor killing in Turkey to
surface publically.”
Gay rights groups argue that
there is an increasingly open homophobia in
Firat Soyle, a human rights
lawyer for Lambda, who was advising Mr. Yildiz before his death, said that
three months before the murder, Mr. Yildiz had filed a complaint at the local
prosecutor’s office that he was receiving death threats from his family. Mr.
Soyle said the prosecutor’s office had refused to investigate or provide Mr.
Yildiz with protection
The case, which has caused a
bout of national soul-searching, has underlined the tensions between the
secular modern
That clash of values permeates
Turkish society.
Moreover, as the article notes, while it may be
true that gay honor killings have previously been unheard of in Turkey, such
honor killings are not unusual in
Turkey when it comes to women, “who face being killed by male relatives for perceived
grievances ranging from consensual sex outside of marriage to stealing a glance
at a boy. A recent government survey estimated that one person dies every week in
Whatever else may be true, the simple
fact that
The Ergenekon Trial
The other article (22 November;
click
here for the full text), “In Turkey,
Trial Casts Wide Net of Mistrust,” also by Dan Bilefsky, concerns the trial which has just begun in Istanbul
that “has brought into relief the larger strains in
Turkey between a secular elite seeking to hold on to its waning influence and a
growing, increasingly assertive population of observant Muslims.” In what is commonly referred to as The Ergenekon Trial, the indictment alleges
links between an armed attack on the Turkish Council of State in 2006 that left
a judge dead, a bombing of a secularist newspaper, threats and attacks against
people accused of being unpatriotic, as well as plans of some groups in the
Turkish Armed Forces to overthrow the present government. According to the
investigation, Ergenekon had a role in the murder of Hrant Dink, a prominent
journalist of Armenian descent. Among
the thousands of pages of other allegations, there are charges of plotting to
foment unrest by assassinating intellectuals, politicians, judges, military
staff, and religious leaders, with the ultimate goal of toppling the
pro-Western incumbent government in a coup that was planned to take
place this year. Hearings began on 20
October 2008. Bilefsky writes,
194 people have been charged,
accused of trying to overthrow the government as part of Ergenekon, named after
a mythic Turkish valley. Prosecutors contend that they planned to engage in
civil unrest, assassinations and terrorism to create chaos and undermine the
stability of
300 people have been detained
during the investigation…including a writer of erotic novels, four-star
generals and other military officers, professors, editors and underworld
figures—some of whom appear to have committed no offense greater than speaking
in favor of Turkey as a secular state.
On the side of prosecuting the case:
Proponents of the
investigation argue that the trial is a long-overdue historical reckoning aimed
at bringing to account what Turks call “the deep state”: a murky group of
operatives, linked to the military, thought to have battled perceived enemies
of the state since the cold war. The military, which sees itself as the
guardian of
Violence for which the
authorities blame Ergenekon includes an armed attack on a senior state court in
2006 and the 2007 bombing of a leftist newspaper in
For those who believe in its existence, the Deep state (or “state
within the state”) is a group of influential anti-democratic coalitions within
the Turkish political system, composed of high-level elements within the
intelligence services, military, security, judiciary, and mafia. The ideology of the deep state is seen by
leftists as being anti-worker or ultra-nationalist; by Islamists as being
anti-Islamic and secularist; and by ethnic Kurds as being anti-Kurdish. Rumors of the deep state have been widespread
in Turkey since 1973, when then prime minister Bülent Ecevit revealed the
existence of “Counter-Guerrilla,” a
Turkish branch of Operation Gladio
(a code name denoting the clandestine NATO “stay-behind” operation—initially
started in Italy after WWII as anti-communist resistance to the possibility of
a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe, and eventually used as an informal
name for all stay-behind NATO organizations).
As one of the nations that prompted the Truman Doctrine, Turkey was one
of the first countries to participate in Operation Gladio and, some say, the
only country where it has not been purged—the Turkish stay-behind forces being
seen as two-pronged: the military
“Counter-Guerrilla” (an inheritor to the Special Warfare Department funded by
the U.S. Military Mission for Aid to Turkey [JUSMMAT] program, and the civilian
“Ergenekon.” The most recent allegations
come from the current AKP Prime
Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who, on a. television show, stated his
belief in the existence of the deep state: “I don't agree with those who say
the deep state does not exist. It does
exist. It has always has - and it did not start with the Republic; it dates
back to Ottoman times. It's simply a tradition. It must be minimized, and if
possible even annihilated.” Some see the Ergenekon investigations, under
Erdoğan's watch, as the execution of this purge
Opposed to it:
Government critics say the
Ergenekon case is a concerted effort by Justice and Development [AKP] to
restore its dented credibility by demonizing its opponents.
“Ergenekon has become a larger
project in which the investigation is being used as a tool to sweep across
civic society and cleanse
In an extensive study of the
case for the Central
Asia-Caucasus Institute, a Washington research institute affiliated
with Johns Hopkins
University, Gareth Jenkins, a Turkey specialist, noted the pervasive
fear among Western analysts of Turkey that Ergenekon “represents a major step,
not, as its proponents maintain, towards the consolidation of pluralistic
democracy in Turkey, but towards an authoritarian one-party state.” …Mr. Jenkins, who has analyzed the first two
of three vast mass Ergenekon indictments — 2,455 and 1,909 pages — argued that
some allegations were absurd.
Professor Suheyl Batum [who
teaches constitutional law at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, and who is
advising a team of lawyers for several defendants] said Ergun Poyraz [who has
written more than five books critical of the government] had been detained for
29 months and Tuncay Ozkan [a secular journalist and critic of the governing party]
for 13 months without any evidence that either had committed a crime. He argued that snippets from their recorded
cellphone conversations—like “What should we do about antisecular
policies?”—were construed as evidence that they were plotting to overthrow the
government.
It appears to many that the AKP is
utilizing this legal action to intimidate, attack, and potentially destroy its
opposition; and, to these same people, that seems completely consistent with
other tactics of the party—all in the direction of fighting the Kemailst forces
of secularism, continuing restrictions on minority rights (most hotly
contested, Kurdish ones), and generally attempting to suppress dissent. As for the last, since September
The fact that the AKP has managed to change the Penal Code to allow the
prosecution of high ranking military officers in civilian courts certainly
represents a major step in reducing the power of the military: in Turkey, as in most countries, it is
presumptively true that the military justice system has jurisdiction over
military personnel, and that therefore the military is usually heavily
insulated from more general accountability.
Liberal supporters of the AKP rightfully point to the fact that a
four-star general has been indicted by a civilian court and is going to stand
trial before a civilian judge in the Ergenekon
case as a major inroad of civilian control into
the long history of the invulnerability of the impervious Turkish
military establishment. It is also
extremely significant that the military was unable to get a closure vote last
year to outlaw the AKP, as this has been its historic way of dealing with what
it sees as threats to
On the other hand, there is a clear danger posed by the Islamist
direction—the covert version far more pernicious than the overt—of AKP policies
and intentions; and the danger from the increasingly fundamentalist AKP
electoral base is very real. The
contention that Turkey will be immune from the ravages of radical political
Islam that have been sweeping the rest of the Islamic world seems totally
ill-founded—not least because it assumes the continuation of an attitude
towards and allegiance to “Turkish-ness” that actually have been supplied and
enforced by the Kemalists, against whose policies and control the AKP is
fighting. Furthermore, the AKP has been
proceeding in a style that is obviously repressive: they have repeatedly sought to destroy
critics and opposing forces, as may be the case with the Doğan case.
Whatever else may be true, the Ergenekon case certainly seems intertwined with other major battles
over
And now…
In the March
nationwide local elections for provincial assemblies this year, the ruling AKP suffered its first major electoral
setback since the party was founded in August 2001. Whereas the party had predicted winning more
than 50% of the votes, it actually won just 38.9%--losing almost 8% from its
levels in the 2007 general elections—the first time that the party had failed
to increase its vote in an election since it came to power in 2002 with 34.3
%. Gareth
Jenkins (a Turkey
specialist quoted above in relation to the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute
study of the Ergenekon case; he is the author of the recently published, Political
Islam in Turkey: Running West, Heading East? [Palgrave Macmillan, 2008]) wrote in his article, “
there is no doubt that, in an election campaign largely fought on national
rather than local issues, the AKP badly misread public perceptions of its
record in office. It is likely that the AKP's popularity has been damaged by
its failure to be seen as taking adequate measures to address the slowdown in
the Turkish economy -- which was sliding into recession even before the global
crisis broke in October 2008. However, the AKP also appears to have failed to
take into account a shift in public perceptions of its attitudes towards clean
government and Kurdish identity.
Despite AKP efforts to publicly assert its commitment to secularism, most
of the domestic debates about the party since it was first founded have
centered on religion—particularly about whether or not it ultimately plans to
change the prevailing interpretation of secularism in
But in September 2008, the CHP suddenly changed strategies and began publishing
details of corruption scandals involving leading members and many local party
officials of the AKP. The strategy undercut the AKP's subtle suggestions that
the private religious values of its members made them immune to the corruption
that had become endemic under previous administrations.
The AKP had
devoted a great amount of time and money to winning these elections, which
makes the slip in support even more significant.
In a most interesting piece by Jonathan Kolieb
in the World
Politics Review, he wrote,
The litmus test for the AKP is not how the headscarf issue proceeds, but
how the party grapples with other glaring inconsistencies in the Turkish
polity. The Alevi religious community suffers religious discrimination, the tiny Jewish community endures
systemic and socially ingrained anti-Semitism, and the Kurdish population has
long campaigned for greater
representation in
If the AKP's reform agenda begins and ends with loosening headscarf strictures
and does not tackle these other pressing problems, then the AKP will be
rightfully labeled parochial and narrow-minded and, at worst, be exposed as the
Islamist party that many Turkish secularists fear it is.
Issues like Article 301 and the treatment of
minorities in the country are problems that are not solely the province of the
AKP or of the current moment. If
Meanwhile, the EU has been anything but helpful in its
approach to
HISTORY OF THE POST-WORLD WAR II URBAN DEVELOPMENT
OF ISTANBUL
|
|
|
|
The population of Istanbul Istanbul Golden Horn is
the most important protected deep water harbor.
The prosperity of the city—and the relative poverty of rural Turkey —has made it a magnet for migration; and
people have migrated in droves to Istanbul , much
as they have to New York City Istanbul
% BUILT-UP AREA
The mass migrations from rural
areas into Turkey Turkey Turkey Istanbul
This explosion of Istanbul’s
population since the 1950s has led to massive residential building, which has
resulted in a vast expansion of the inhabited area of the city (q.v., at right, a map of Istanbul’s urban
footprint, in black, comparing the situations in 1950 and 2000)—a large portion of Istanbul still remaining
undeveloped (e.g., its vast Black Sea
forest areas).
Moreover, the economic pressure of
Istanbul
What follows is my attempt to
trace some of the patterns and issues in the urban development of modern Istanbul
There is a history to legal urban
development in Istanbul
The Gecekondu
The massive influx of migrants
into Istanbul 
provisions were transformed into
private ownership, the great preponderance of land remained as public domain,
in the control and disposal of the State.
According to Çağlar Keyder (1999), p.147, “The Kemalist state was prepared neither to build public
housing nor to alienate state land to private-sector development—instead the
vast inertia of populist clientelism prevailed.” While there has been some central planning
(from 1936-50, the Republic hired French architect and planner Henri Prost to
create a master plan for Istanbul [q.v.,
his 1937 plan, at right]), but it consisted mainly of engineering boulevards
and large roads through the city (which, in themselves, turned out to be
inadequate to the growth that ensued), and paid no attention at all to the severe
housing crises that were occurring in the city.
In the absence of any housing
policies, these migrants started to build their own homes on any vacant land
they could find. In most cases, the land was illegally occupied—or, at very
least, illegally subdivided. The name gecekondu (from “gece” meaning “night,” and “kondu”
meaning “settled” or “landed”; thus “landed at night”) began to be applied to such buildings. According to an Ottoman law of 1858, if one
can find unused government land, and build a house on it in 24 hours, one owns
it. Whether this law actually had any real legal standing in the modern urban
situation in Istanbul
The pattern was for an immigrant
to arrive in the city and find some employment (whether directly in one of
Istanbul’s burgeoning manufacturing industries, or simply as a street seller,
shoe polisher, porter, waiter, etc.), then erect a hut on whatever spot of
available land he could find, using makeshift materials, so the rest of his
family would have a place to live; in
addition to the constructed dwelling, the plot would contain an area for a
small garden; the structures were then progressively improved and expanded as
time and resources permitted, eventually even becoming substantial, permanent
brick and mortar buildings. As these
self-built garden towns of poorer rural immigrants proliferated, the gecekondu
became the very symbol of the rural/agricultural-urban/manufacturing
transition, as they contained elements of both city and village. Although the
resident would now be working at some urban job, he could continue to raise
some food for his family in the unit’s own small garden; and often, early on,
he might even return to his village at harvest time to participate there.
Orhan Esen writes,
The
gecekondus usually developed within walking distance to the industrial sites,
mostly on the (steep) slopes surrounding industrial valleys like Dolapdere,
Kağithane and Alibeyköy, or west of the old town walls of Zeytinburnu
which was situated between two industrial zones by the Sea of Marmara, as well
as along the southern slope of the Kayişdaği-Aydos range on the Asian
side, parallel to İstanbul's eastern industrial zone stretching along the
arterial road to Ankara. People would walk down the hills from the gecekondu
settlements - which almost always had names ending with tepe, "hill"
- thereby saving the fares for transportation to the workplace. There rarely was adequate factory work,
however, so gecekondu life was always precarious, and highly dependent on
kinship ties for support.
Authorities at first tried to
demolish these houses, but they were quickly rebuilt. Between 1945 and 1960,
politicians began acting in ways that encouraged gecekondus. Beginning with the Squatter Housing Law (Gecekondu Kanunu) passed in 1966, the
issue of the gecekondu was at least acknowledged, and title to land began
legally to be established. They
gradually spread over many parts of the city, and by 1970s they had long been
recognized by city authorities. In 1976,
all gecekondus built before that date had been regularized; and in 1983 a
general building amnesty was granted for all unlicensed buildings in the city
(with the exception of the Bosphorus area). By 1985, most of the existing
gecekondu plots had been legalized.
According to Orhan Esen, by
allowing the gecekondu process,
The state
was able to save urbanization costs and counteract political conflicts resulting
from the traumatizing impacts of urbanization. In calculating the cost of
labor, businesses were able to disregard housing expenses. And politicians had
come upon a treasure trove with a huge potential of new voters, whose loyalty
to party structures could be secured against entry into the land register. Last
but not least, the gecekondu people themselves had a chance to socially support
their ‘becoming a city dweller’ while it was easy to finance and somewhat
mitigated in its impact.
Orhan has suggested that part of
the motivation behind the official acceptance of the gecekondu
process—especially given developments in the Communist world— may have been to
avoid the creation in the city of an alienated proletariat class, supporting
the gecekondu dwellers’ continued connection to the land, even as he was
becoming urbanized.
Eventually, every time there would
be an election, there would be a new wave of concessions offered to gecekondu
dwellers. Services such as piped water,
electricity, paved roads were traded for votes.
The disputed legal status was first dealt with by granting “amnesties,”
and eventually by legitimization: when a
community reached the level of 2,000 residents, it could apply for status as an
ilçe (district) or belediye (municipality); once that happened, land ownership was
officially possible—individual residents could be granted a tapu (title
deed). I could not help but feel the
comparison to a similar process that has taken place—and continues to take
place— in Mumbai, where the granting of ownership of
squatter-occupied land in return for political allegiance and votes is also a
central mechanism of the development of the informal cities there—and which
provides a subtle but pernicious mechanism for the disempowerment (if not
outright disenfranchisement) of people and the neutralizing of what should be
their enormous potential political power in the democratic process of the city.
It has been pointed out that the
informal cities of the gecekondu are similar to the barrios and favelas of Latin America ; and, indeed, they share a sense of
vitality, community, and positive values.
Sociological research has shown the gecekondu dwellers tended to be
optimistic, have high expectations in the future for themselves and their
children. Even though there was little
integration in city life, they identified more with their city than their
village of origin. In 70s, gecekondu
dwellers began to express their own sub-culture, called arabesk, mainly through
music. “These huts, though badly built, are, with their colors, their little 
gardens, their chaotic but lively
growth, somehow better looking than the rigid, formal ranks of massive
apartment blocks which sooner or later take their place.” [Ayşe Saraçgil
(1997-98-99), p.107]. Like the many of the favelas of São Paulo
Because of the later developments
described below, much of the original gecekondu development has long-since
disappeared in Istanbul Istanbul
Legal Housing
Better-off, middle-income people
were attracted to live in Istanbul Istanbul
There were two main ways of
building legal housing in Istanbul
1. through
the yap-sat process (literally, “build-sell”), small-scale, middle-class capitalist construction
paradigm: those who had a developed or
undeveloped plot would agree with a building contractor to construct a block of
flats, a certain number (negotiated depending on land prices in the area) going
to the original owner, the rest going to the builder, who would pre-sell
them—often by monthly installments and down-payments—to cover the cost of
construction. In this system, quite
common until the 1980, small and medium sized builders dominated this
market. After 1980, available land
decreased significantly and the market was hit with an economic crisis and
large companies entered into the housing construction market. Nevertheless, the yap-sat process transformed
the urban landscape in Istanbul Bosporus districts Sariyer and Beykoz.
2. through
the formation of a housing cooperative (kooperatif): people in their work groups would get
together and form a cooperative to buy a plot of land and arrange with a
contractor to build it. Members would
pay monthly installments and down-payments set by the cooperative. At the beginnings of this form of development
in the 60s, most of the groups forming cooperatives were in government agencies
and bureaucracies, and, consequently, the political patronage in this system
was an enormous, with land often being transferred at extremely preferential
rates. This cooperative movement was able to present an alternative of
regulated urbanization which appealed to the middle classes. Often the cooperatives took the form of
large-scale high-rise buildings, increasingly on the periphery of the city.
Both the yap-sat process and the
cooperatives contributed to the development of multi-story blocks, and a drastic re-compaction of the already
built-up city centre. Low density areas
were replaced by high-rise blocks during the process, and the city's old
architectural heritage of single family houses has been driven to the point of
near-extinction. Increasing densities
have strained the existing infrastructure, causing traffic congestion, air and
noise pollution. The low quality design
of the buildings produced by these processes is due in part to the fact that
the construction companies—on all levels, until quite recently—have rarely
utilized any architectural input: to
economize and maximize their profit margins, design is something that is not
paid attention to at all.
The Post-Gecekondu
There was an entire new wave of
migration into the city in the 70s and 80s.
(In the
80s alone, Istanbul
As the both
yapsat system of the middle classes and the garden towns of the new workers came
upon natural, geographic boundaries by the end of the seventies, they were
facing a decisive crisis. There was no public land left for occupation, nor
inner-city property for joint ventures with the yapsatçis. But immigration continued regardless, and the high
demand for cheap housing persisted. The credit for recognizing the ‘huge
potential’ inherent in the intersection of the two systems goes to the
neoliberal head of state Turgut Özal and his ‘legendary’ mayor Dalan, who
translated it into ‘straightforward political action.’ When in 1983 the
neoliberal Mother Country Party (ANAP) won the first free election after the
1980 coup, the potential of the yap-sat model was adopted and used for the
gecekondus. While the gecekondu amnesties of the fifties, sixties and seventies
had been put forward for humane reasons, the protagonists now shamelessly came
up with free-enterprise arguments. Under the ANAP government, an entire nation
is re-trained to become speculators, stock exchange observers and brokers, and the
gecekondu people - tired of the political turbulence of the past thirty years -
voluntarily adopt the new course. This is a time of using money to make money.
According to Özal, the legalized gecekondu estates are vintage seed capital.
Moreover, the country is in the midst of a tough inflation - to keep afloat,
people have to invest their capital to good account
This marked
the beginning of an urban re-compaction which was to be far more extensive than
that of the middle-class districts.
This post-1980 transformation of
the gecekondu area into small scale capitalist enterprises via the yap-sat
system is named by Orhan post-gecekondu
development. As a result, favorable
gecekondu sites gave their residents the chance to produce a certain amount of
wealth and enter into the new middle class. The less favored sites (like the
slums of the old city they were turning into) accommodated the losers of the
de-industrialization process and Neo-Liberal economic policies, and became a
new lower class.)
35-40%
of Istanbul is currently post-gecekondu
development, which has become the predominant topography of current day Istanbul Istanbul Istanbul
In 1984, a new administrative
model, the Greater
Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality
was established, consolidating all of what had been the metropolitan region
into a huge, single municipality
of Istanbul
Other Developments of the
1980s
The 80s also saw
the increased development of high-rise mass housing for low-income immigrants
who had not made it into the post-gecekondu process. Starting in 1985, TOKI began building these towers, mostly at the far periphery of
the city. (At the right, in a photograph
by Cemal Emden are the TOKI tower blocks in Ataşehir, near the endless traffic of the
Interestingly, 70% of the white
collar population of the city began to locate on the Asian side, even though
70% of the jobs are on the European side.
This is simply because land prices skyrocketed everywhere in proximity
to the most desirable commercial and financial district which follows the high
ridge of the Büyükdere
axis (Büyükdere
Caddesi being the main road atop this high ground, separating the two parallel
valleys of the Bosphorus and the Cendere)—an axis, by the way, that is an
economic dividing line for the city (to the east of it is always affluent, to
the west poor and proletarian) and 
along which all of the most
prestigious high-rise office buildings most luxurious high-rise residential
buildings (e.g., the Sapphire Tower;
as part of our Urban Age tour, we got to go to the 54th floor
roof deck of this grand residential tower[which is still under construction, so
it was in hard hats and neon-colored vests], and the photograph to the left is
of Büyükdere Caddesi from there; the
nighttime view to the right is a stock photo) are currently being built in the
21st Century. Rents drop
proportionately to the distance one moves away from this axis—more
precipitously to the west, of course, than to the east. In the neighborhood of Beşiktaş, for example, rents are quite high (€
2,000/month, and as high as € 3,500/mo. for those with a view) due it its
proximity this axis, despite the fact that the housing stock there is anything
but fancy. By comparison, far more desirable but much more affordable
housing can be had on the Asian side for as
little as € 1,400/mo.
The 1990s and Beyond
In the 1990s, the rapidly growing
migrant population had reached such heights that only 37 percent of the
population in Istanbul had been born in the
city, and Istanbul 
between Istanbul São Paulo , where the prevalence of crime has
engendered gated developments with high walls, topped with electrified barbed wire,
the gated communities of Istanbul Istanbul
According to Çağlar Keyder (in the Urban Age
As a commodity, land became
the favored object of speculation
Public sector
infrastructure projects and motorway construction blazed the path, as in the
residential and business development around TEM, the Trans-European Motorway. The
central government’s Mass Housing Administration (TOKI) participated in this
development by creating high-rise residential units for low-income groups in
the far peripheries of the city. Roads connecting to the anticipated third
bridge over the
When the Directorate of
Privatization Administration sold 100,000 square metres of National Highways
Authority land in Zincirlikuyu to a Turkish business group for US$ 800 million
in 2007, the price of land in this central business area increased
substantially. Shortly thereafter, the
According to Keyder, until the 1990s, it looked as if
Things changed, however,
when the conservative-Islamic AKP (Justice and Development)
party—which won the 1994 local elections thanks to support from rural
immigrants in peripheral neighborhoods—proved to be surprisingly
pro-business. In abandoning traditional
populism they started looking for new ways to market the city; their adoption
of the neo-liberal discourse found a perfect fit in projects preparing the city
for showcase on the global stage.
All this led to a liberalization of the Turkish
economy and a deliberate attempt to attract global capital and global networks
to
This second wave
of land-taking came to a temporary standstill
with the 1999 earthquake and the 2001-02 national economic crisis. This wave
had been much more turbulent and powerful than the first one (1945-80), which
was moderate and almost unobtrusive; and it was carried out under the banner of
attracting what was seen as “distorted urbanization.” As
Esen writes,
In the wake of an ideological
re-orientation affecting all milieus and strata, the “distorted urbanization”
discourse in the nineties…met surprisingly broad acceptance, and even underwent
the strange transformation into becoming a part of the official rhetoric.
Its intellectual renaissance
sprang from the milieu of left-wing orientated architects, no less, following
the example of “socialist town planning.” It became actual mainstream in the
nineties when the post-gecekondu was in full bloom
Thus, the concept of
“distorted urbanization” was accepted as a target value in the bureaucratic
discourse although this kind of language, among other things, highlights the
deficits of official functionaries. And finally, it was passed on by
professionals of the building sector interested in jobs with the big building
companies to the industry, which found it convenient to use. The final
destination was its adoption by the media, which introduced the new non-place,
the varoş and its inhabitants,
the maganda.
All this led to a policy of “erase and rebuild.”
These changing realities have required the
development of a new discourse about the urban development of the city: the old situation, with its huge numbers of
small property owners, had necessitated smaller interventions and programs; to
accommodate the large scale interventions needed to fuel the current real
estate industry, a larger issue needed to be developed. And
Now, it can be
argued that there is, in fact, a reasonable desire in this to protect the
inhabitants of the city in this earthquake prone region. When the 17 August 1999 Marmara Earthquake (7.4 on the Richter scale) hit Istanbul 
the death toll exceeding 15,000.) Nevertheless, as Orhan Esen has pointed out,
it is highly suspect that the government has embraced the issue with such zeal,
given that it provides the opportunity to force the redevelopment of ~60% of the
existing building stock of Istanbul—providing still yet again an opportunity to
rebuild the city as has occurred twice before in the recent past, this time
mostly the vast post-gecekondu areas of the city. For the conspiracy-minded among us, it is
worthwhile to look carefully at the map of the distribution of damage in
Istanbul from the 1999 earthquake (the insert to the right being a map produced
by the Istanbul Governorate Disaster Management Center [From Mustafa Erdik et al., “Earthquake Risk to Buildings in
Istanbul and a Proposal for its Mitigation,” Department of Earthquake
Engineering, Boĝaziçi University, Istanbul, 2001]), and to ponder the
question of how much the redevelopment done in the name of earthquake risk
mitigation will actually follow the actual pattern of risk, and how much it
will follow socio-economic lines—which seem like they could be quite different
from the areas of damage on this map.
To add to that projected program for urban
redevelopment, there is what is perhaps an even more pernicious project
afoot: the 2005 “Urban Transformation
Law” (Law 5366), which calls for the demolition of unsightly neighborhoods in core areas in the name of urban transformation. Under the banner of providing better
neighborhoods around the city’s historic monuments and creating wider streets
to accomodate modern shopping and better traffic circulation and parking for
private automobiles, this
bill purports to be a kind of 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. [Our old friend Alex Garvin has insisted that this form
of building process should be termed “façodomy”!] It is also 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, 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) 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 farthest periphery of the city.
Law 5366 is aimed directly at
With the global crisis and economic downturn,
poverty and inequality have become more severe, creating more social
exclusiveness, and perhaps the development of a permanent under-class—heavily
populated by ethnic minorities, for example the Gypsies of the Roma community,
Kurds, Armenians, and refugees from African countries. No longer able to build a gecekondu, recent
migrants have been relegated to marginality in derelict neighborhoods—and these
are the neighborhoods primarily targeted for demolition under Law 5366. It has been suggested that this round of
redevelopment is actually more ethnic cleansing that urban renewal, with the
current inhabitants relocated to farthest periphery of the city.
Asu Aksoy
writes,
The head of TOKİ, the
Prime Ministry’s Housing Development Administration, declared that half of İstanbul’s
housing stock (approximately 3 million buildings) would have to be replaced
over the next 20 years; work would begin in 20 slum-housing areas.
The Roma community of Sulukule is an old settlement within the Fatih area of
Orhan Esen has claimed that there is a
level of fear and contempt that has arisen in the old middle-class of Istanbul
that has shaped a new and different attitude towards both the new middle
classes of the post-gecekondu and towards the growing under-class of the city,
in which the term gecekondu, with its positive social connotations and
associations, has become replaced by a new pejorative term, varoş—derived from the Hungarian
meaning “little city,” it has come to connote “no-go zone,” used to designates
a place of allegedly impenetrable chaos, and where safety is threatened—the
assumption being that people who build illegally will not shy away from
committing any other subversive acts either.
The concept of varoş reflects the anxieties of the old middle
class, especially the wage-dependent, “white collar,” educated middle class,
and reflects a growing tension between it and the new post-gecekondu middle
class, the two groups having progressively drifted apart since the 80s. As
Orhan has written,
The varoş is now a
perfect culprit for anything the middle class is worried about: deficient
quality in buildings and the associated earthquake risks, colonization of water
reserves, pollution, infrastructural shortcomings, rural machismo and discrimination
of women, the mafia. Never before have the intra-urban boundary lines been so
clear-cut: On the one hand, the apartman milieu, outwardly politically correct
and cosmopolitan, always voting left-national, often impoverished; on the
other, the post-gecekondu milieu, seeking to safeguard its economic status,
where people increasingly like to see themselves as İstanbuler and always
vote right-wing (with Islamic, liberal, and conservative undertones) or
Kurdish-leftist (e.g., Gazi) parties. These two antagonists aggressively strive
for a dominance of their respective cultural code of conduct in public space.
The rift between the two urban milieus is evident in symbolic debates,
revolving for instance around the headscarf or barbecuing in public spaces… It
diverts the educated citizens’ attention from the true war arena. The
aggressive activities and projects of the new big players—especially in the
ecologically sensitive north, the water protection zones and the rural
environs—is in sharp competition to those of the "mafia-style"
post-gecekondu milieu.
According to Çağlar Keyder (in the Urban Age
The current crisis…exhibits
a less benign aspect of this spatial expansion in
the form of real estate development fueled by the global wave of speculative
investment. Coalitions formed during the last 15 years facilitated and profited
from this development; the financial explosion that accompanied economic growth
contributed to it. As a result,
The bursting of the bubble
in the credit market, however, has dashed the dream. There is likely to be a
long wait before the existing stock finds utilization through attrition,
upgrading and expansion. The danger is that the cessation of new construction
and land development will rob the city of its major motor of growth in terms of
absorbing investment and creating employment, leading to an unavoidable period
of relative stagnation.
There are always
tensions in the growth of cities:
between the need for modernization and the desire to preserve the
past; between the encouragement of
economic development and the prevention of the development of economically
disadvantaged under-classes; between the
rights of wealth accumulation and the right to basic human dignity and healthy
existence of the poor; between the building of roads and the preservation of
the fabric of the city; between a high-tech lifestyle and ecological concerns
about climate change. Nevertheless, it
is clear that in Istanbul
|
|
ADMINIS- TRATIVE CITY (KM2) |
1900 POPULATION ADMINISTRATIVE CITY |
METRO- POLITAN REGION (KM2) |
CURRENT POPULATION METROPOLITAN REGION |
POPULATION GROWTH SINCE 1900 |
|
|
5,343 |
903,482 |
5,343 |
12,697,164 |
1,305% |
|
|
833 |
3,437,200 |
27,065 |
18,815,988 |
447% |
|
|
6,341 |
1,000,000 |
6,341 |
18,150,000 |
1,715% |
|
|
1,572 |
6,506,954 |
28,030 |
7,556,900 |
16% |
|
|
1,484 |
415,000 |
4,979 |
19,239,910 |
4,536% |
|
JOHANNESBURG |
1,644 |
829,400 |
17,010 |
3,888,180 |
369% |
|
BERLIN |
892 |
2,712,190 |
5,370 |
4,300,000 |
59% |
|
MUMBAI |
438 |
927,994 |
4,355 |
19,280,000 |
1,978% |
SÃO
PAULO
|
1,525
|
239,820 |
7,944
|
19,223,897 |
7,916% |
[When touring
Day 1: 31 October Saturday
After a ten hour non-stop flight from
The weather was
very wet and cold (7°C), with a driving, drenching rain that persisted
throughout the day. Nevertheless, we were
in
We first headed for the Hagia Sophia, but,
as there were long lines to get in (a warning: cruise ships dock in Istanbul;
and when they disgorge their huddled masses, that retched refuse makes straight
for the best known of the tourist attractions; it is best to visit such places
either earlier or later in the day), we walked through Sultanahmet Park to the Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmet Camii) [at
right]. Commissioned by Sultan Ahmet I
to rival the nearby Hagia 
Sophia, and built between 1606-16, the
Blue Mosque is an imposing structure.
Quite controversially, it was designed to have six minarets. (The number of minarets a mosque has is meant
to reflect the importance and stature of the person for whom it was named—the
more important the person, the greater number of minarets. Having six was deemed irreverently audacious,
as this is the only mosque in the world outside of 
shoes before entering, and women are
required to cover their heads. It is
also closed to visitors during the times of prayer.) The “Blue Mosque” gets its name from the
profusion of blue Iznik tiles that adorn its interior [at left 
and right]—flooded by light from the many
stained glass windows. While very
imposing—and originally striking us as quite beautiful, it being the first of
our historic buildings in Istanbul—it is actually less aesthetically pleasing
than many of the others we eventually visited, being a bit too intensely
decorative and busy for my taste, and a
tad heavy-handed architecturally (the central dome is relatively small for the
size of the building, and it is supported by four massive interior columns that
are a far less elegant solution than the structure of the Hagia Sophia, on
which it was modeled).
We then proceeded
to walk in the downpour through the Hippodrome,
the ancient center of life in
From the southern
end of the Hippodrome, we wended our way to the Küçük Aya Sofya Camii
(the “Little Aya Sofya”), one of the
real “finds” of our trip. Built by the Emperor Justinian (and Theodora)
ca. 527-536, this little former church (converted to a mosque ca. 1500) is an
elegantly proportioned irregular octagon.
It has balance, quiet beauty, and tasteful decoration—a true gem of a building. We spent over an hour soaking in the
experience of this building, wandering around every inch of it, including its
upper galleries, unrestricted in a way not possible in most of the city’s major
mosques (where there are barriers preventing non-worshippers from entering
either the central space or the apse of the building). When the call to prayer came (it is a
functioning mosque, despite the apparently small size of its congregation), we
stayed quietly at the back through the service; and this, too, was a lovely,
moving experience. It is not to be
missed!
From the Küçük Aya Sofya, we walked north
along Küçük Aya Sofya Cadessi, through a lovely residential area, quickly 
through the uninteresting Arasta Bazaar,
to the Great Palace Mosaic Museum (Büyüksaray Mozaik Müzesi). Over the years, the ground level of the
From there, we
walked through the torrential downpour, past the Blue Mosque, and back across
the Hippodrome to the Museum of Turkish
and Islamic Art (Türk ve Islam
Eserli Müzesi), housed in the 1524 Palace
of İbrahim Paşa, the friend and brother-in-law of Süleyman the
Magnificent. We first went to the
museum’s café and had the first of many wonderful cups of çay—delicious Turkish
tea, served piping hot in small, handle-less glass tulip cups; and a quite
restorative moment of relaxation and warmth.
This was the second great “find”
of our day: the museum’s magnificent
collection displays the entire sweep of the Turkish and Ottoman Empire history
through objets—pottery, inlaid wooden
Qur’an stands, calligraphy, writing sets, illuminated manuscripts, tiles, etc.,
and the most magnificent carpets I have ever seen anywhere—from the 8th
through the 19th Centuries.
We were enthralled and blown away by the beauty and magnificence of the
collection. This place is a “must see.”
We
continued south to the Basilica Cistern
(Yerebatan Sarnıçı). [at
left] The largest surviving Byzantine cistern, this vast underground reservoir
(65m x 143m; once holding 80,000 m3 of water) was built by Justinian
in 532. It has 336 columns in twelve
rows, supporting a series of high barrel vaults. It is an eerie, beautiful place, attractively
lit. One wanders along raised walkways,
over the dark water, filled with ghostly carp.
The more recent history of the Basilica cistern is quite fascinating
[quoted from the Lonely Planet Istanbul
City Guide]:
the cistern seems to have been forgotten by the city
authorities some time before the Conquest. Enter scholar Petrus Gyllius, who in
1545 was researching Byzantine antiquities in the city and was told by locals
that they were able to miraculously obtain water by lowering buckets in their
basement floors. Some were even catching fish this way. Intrigued, Gyllius
explored the neighborhood and finally discovered a house through whose basement
he accessed the cistern. Even after his discovery, the Ottomans (who referred
to the cistern as Yerebatan Saray) didn't treat the underground palace with the
respect it deserved - it became a dumping ground for all sorts of junk, as well
as corpses. Fortunately, later restorations, most notably in the 18th century and
between 1955 and 1960, saw it properly maintained. It was cleaned and renovated
in 1985 by the İstanbul
And we saved the best for last: the Hagia
Sophia (Aya Sofya; the full Greek name is Ναός τῆς Ἁγίας τοῦ Θεοῦ Σοφίας, Church of the Holy Wisdom of God; therefore, “Holy Wisdom” would be the name
in English), which I had been waiting most of my life to see...and it
did not disappoint! The church was
built by Justinian in 537 on the site of
two former Hagia Sophias. It commands
the view from what was the Byzantine acropolis on Saray Point, and it is
prominently visible from just about everywhere (q.v., the wide-angle photograph at the
beginning of the “Introduction” section).
The exterior of
the building seems to be related to the Romanesque times in which it was
built: it has a rather heavy, simple
massing that expresses the interior volumes, beautifully, if somewhat roughly. It is only when one enters the interior
space, however, that the experience becomes transformative and
transcendent: it is not easy to
describe, and even harder to capture in a photograph (so I present, here, on
both sides, a series of shots of the interior).
As one moves into the building from the
courtyard, one passes trough the wide, shallow Outer Narthex, and then though
the similar Inner Narthex, and finally through the Imperial Door (assuming,
during the 900 years of its actual existence as an imperial church, you were
part of an imperial procession—lesser beings never being permitted to enter
through this central doorway). The space
one enters is vast and overwhelming, yet centering and containing; it is dark
and mysterious, yet brilliantly pierced by the light that penetrates though the
many small windows; it is heavy and massive, yet it seems to float weightlessly
and balloon skywards. It is as if this
space was what the word “sublime” was 
created to describe.
The structure of
the building inspires wonder. There is
an abundance of strongly articulated but incredibly graceful architectural
forms: arcades of tall columns, topped
by rounded arches, supporting the second arcade of columns and arches of the
upper gallery—reduced in scale so as to magnify perspectivally the recession
off into the distant heights above, but also to lend progressive lightness to
the upward movement of the central space; and above this level the pendentives
spring to support the enormous (30m in diameter) but apparently weightless
central dome—floating 
ethereally above the circle of light of
the ring of windows at the base of the dome; and the spaces between the
pendentives on the east and west ends of the church balloon gracefully out into
hemi-domes, each in itself opening out into three semi-domes beneath—and
beneath the three semi-domes of the eastern end, the spaces continue down into
an elegant apse and two flanking side chapels, each with the same horizontal
articulation as the central space.
Structurally, the pendentives subtly transfer the weight of the dome
onto the four corners of the side walls, removing the need for visible columns
or any other obvious supporting members—creating the vast openness and magnitude of the
central volume, which at once seems too great for the actual structure, yet at
the same time serenely part of the floating weightlessness of the whole.
The detail that
remains is similarly fabulous: the
awesome seraphim painted in the
pendentives [q.v., at
left], the elegant marble, and the magnificent mosaics—the Madonna and Child in the apse, the Deësis Mosaic (a 14th Century Christ flanked by the
Virgin May and St. John the Baptist) [q.v., below, at right] in the upper gallery, and the one of Constantine the 
Great, the Virgin May, and the Emperor 
Justinian over the
doorway where one exits the church (One
might inadvertently miss this last masterpiece, as it was positioned for
entering the building; but they have cleverly positioned a mirror that reflects
its image and draws attention to its existence.)
Walking up the
ramp to the upper gallery is a treat all its own. One weaves back and forth through the very
fabric of the massive 6th Century masonry of the building as one
moves up through it. Don’t miss the
experience! (And the trip down is
similar.)
When 
Usman, and Umer .
In 1934, as part
of the secular reforms of the new
After a deeply
moving, satisfying couple of hours there, I was finally able to tear myself
away from the Hagia Sophia, and we made the short walk back the Four Seasons.
That evening we
had a delicious, if rather Western, dinner at Seasons, the beautiful restaurant in the courtyard of out
hotel. For me, the main food treat of
the evening was my appetizer of Hamsi—fresh
anchovies—grilled in a traditional local preparation; quite delicious. Perhaps more importantly, we found an
excellent Turkish wine: Kav: Bogazkere-Ökúzgozü
2006 by Doluca. In addition to the pleasure of discovery, the
find was important since French, Italian, and Spanish wines are absurdly
expensive in
Day 2: 1 November Sunday
Our second day
was also cold and rainy, but not nearly as
cold and rainy as the first—so it seemed much less difficult to be out and
about in.
In the morning, we took the Tram from Sultanahmet over the 
Bosphorus to Kabataş—is a wonderful, efficient way to get around most of
the tourist areas in Istanbul. Although
it is soon to be replaced by a card system, the city’s wonderful Akbil is usable on the Tram. (The Akbil
is a small plastic object with a coded metal disk, designed to go on a
keychain, and able to be pre-loaded with cash, and which effortlessly provides
entry into virtually all of the city’s mass transit—including its many
ferries. It provides discounted rates, and it can be used multiple times on a
single trip for all the people travelling with you—a great feature to be
rescinded with the new system]). The
view from the Tram crossing the Galata
Bridge [at left] is spectacular: to the left (westward) one looks up the Golden Horn (the estuary off the Bosphorus which forms the protected,
natural harbor the helped make Istanbul the economic and political world center
it has always been, and which divides the peninsula of the Old City from the
European-side neighborhoods to its north); to the right, down the Golden Horn
to the turquoise expanse of the Bosphorus.
One can also easily walk across this bridge, passing by the innumerable
people fishing off it (but with much
more room to pass them than on the Atatürk Bridge, the next bridge crossing the
Golden Horn upstream, and on the which we walked back across), and savoring the
view in a more languorous fashion.
We got off at Karaköy and began the walk uphill
through the area called Galata. Home to traders from
From the Tower, we continued our way on to
upper Tünel (named for the antique funicular that carries
passengers up the steep hill from 
Karaköy; it is actually a fairly short
walk—albeit a steep one—so it is not all that necessary, but we took it on Day
8, just for the experience). From Tünel then took historic tram [at left] along Istiklal
Cadessi (“
Back on the
historic peninsula, we wended our way southeast, up the hill through several
extremely poor neighborhoods (destined for demolition under Law 5366 [q.v., in my section on the “History OF The Post-World War II Urban Development of
Istanbul”])—including
one with dilapidated and burned-out wooden three-story houses, with the second
and third floors overhanging the first by 3 ft (a style we saw repeated
elsewhere in some older neighborhoods) [e.g.,
at left]. It was often impossible to
tell which of the houses were abandoned and which inhabited, as there often was
little difference in the 
conditions
of the two. There was one small
neighborhood in which there was a project going on to restore a block of these
wooden houses were being renovated (perhaps called Karak, or Konak, or “The
Block” [?]).
Eventually we
ended up at Sülimaniye Camii (Mosque of the Sultan Süleyman the
Magnificent), built atop one of the seven hills of 
Süleyman I. The Süleymaniye
[at right] was the fourth of İstanbul’s imperial mosques, following the
Fatih, Beyazıt and Selim I. Sinan, ever challenged by the technical
accomplishments of the Hagia Sophia, took the floor plan of that church and
here perfected its adaptation to the requirements of Muslim worship. Unfortunately, the mosque is currently under
construction, and we were only able to enter the interior of one of its side
aisles—the main space and the surrounding gardens all being closed. From what we could see, the interior [the
photo at right showing the central space we never got to enter] is wonderfully
light, and decorated with an elegant simplicity. It is one of those places we shall need 
to return to on some future visit to
From the Süleymaniye, we walked to the Spice Bazaar (Mısır Çarşısı) [at right]—constructed in
1660, it is a bustling spot with shops selling spices, nuts, honeycomb, figs,
and dried fruit. Then we walked through
a neighborhood full of shops selling flowers, plants, and song birds, to Yeni Camii (The New Mosque) [at left], built in 1597 under a commission from
Valide Sultan Safiye, mother of Sultan Mehmed III.
We took a quick
look at this mosque before getting the Tram at the Eminönü stop and returning briefly to the Four Seasons for a
refreshing and warming cup of delicious apple tea—always available in the
afternoons in the entrance to the hotel—and a brief respite in our room, before
heading out again.
We
took a taxi west from the Four Seasons to take a brief look at the Erdine Gate of the Theodosian Walls at Edirnekapi.
[an intact section of the walls is shown at left]. These fortifications were built starting at
the beginning of the reign of Theodosius II in 408. The taxi then took us to Fatih, a very poor neighborhood, and one of the most fundamentalist
of Muslim areas in 
common elsewhere even in the conservative
areas of the city—and one even sees a number of women dressed completely in black, totally covered except for a small
area around their eyes. I am told that
this last form of dress was unheard of in
We then went to
the Fethiye Camii (Mosque of Victory) [at left], built in
the 12th Century as the Church
of Theotokos Pammakaristos (Church
of the Joyous Mother of God), it was converted to a mosque in 1573 and is
still in use.
The side chapel,
“The Parecclesion,” [at right] has
been restored to its
Byzantine splendor and converted to a museum. The Parracclesion is a truly marvelous
space.
Within it are some beautifully restored
Byzantine mosaics
Adorning the dome
is the Christ Pantocrator (the most
common translation of Pantocrator is “Almighty” or “All-powerful”;
another, more literal, translation is “Ruler of All” or, less literally,
“Sustainer of the World.”) and 12
Prophets [at right].
From the Fethiye
Camii, we went to the
While there
seemed to us to be a treasure trove mosaics at the Fethiye Camii, the sheer magnitude of what awaited us at the
unbelievable collection of Byzantine
mosaics and frescoes, and we spent over an hour and a half taking them all
in. The common assertion is that all of
the artwork dates from 1312. It was funded
by Theodore Metochites, a man of letters who was auditor of the Treasury under
Andronikos II (between 1282 and 1328). One of the wonderful mosaics, found
above the door to the nave in the Esonarthex
(inner narthex), depicts Theodore
offering the church to Christ. [at left]
Over the inside of the main door to the Naos (nave) of the church is the very
beautiful Koimesis (the
“Dormition of the Blessed Virgin,” the last sleep before her Assumption to
Heaven) [at right, with detail, below]. The well-composed, subtle mosaic
riveted our attention more than any of the other 
magnificent works at the 
because some of these mosaics had been rather extensively redone in the 15th
Century! That, of course, would be far
more consistent with the quality we had been so taken with in certain of the
faces.
On the left are two
other examples of the many superb mosaics which adorn the Exonarthex (outer narthex), Esonarthex,
(inner narthex), and Naos (nave) of
the
In
the Parecclesion (side chapel),
there are frescoes that deal with
the themes of death and resurrection, depicting scenes taken from the Old
Testament. The striking painting in the apse known as the Anastasis (“Resurrection”) [at right] shows a powerful Christ
raising Adam and Eve out of their sarcophagi, with saints and kings in
attendance. Though no one knows for certain, it is thought that the frescoes
were painted by the same masters who created the mosaics. Theirs is an
extraordinary accomplishment, as the paintings, with their sophisticated use of
perspective and exquisitely portrayed facial expressions, rival those painted
by the Italian master Giotto, the painter who more than any other ushered in
the Italian Renaissance.
We left the
Ottoman cuisine is a buried
treasure, the heritage of a great empire which lasted 700 years… A synthesis of
Central Asian, Anatolian, Middle Eastern and Balkan flavors.
Here at Asitane, we have made it our mission to reintroduce authentic
Ottoman cooking to the world. Since
1991, dedicated staff have hunted down lost tastes with academic zeal. We have consulted a variety of sources,
including the budget ledgers of the three main palace kitchens—Topkapi,
It is moderately
priced, and Nancy and I wildly over-ordered to sample a wide variety of the
tasty treats (the dates in square brackets “[ ]” are the ones the menu indicates as the dates of origin of the
recipes they are using):
appetizers—Vişneli Yaprak Sarma
[1844] (Vine leaves with a blend
of sour cherries, rice, onions, and pine nuts, seasoned with black pepper and
cinnamon), Istridye Mantarli İsli Çerkez Peyniri Izgarasi (Grilled
Circassian cheese with oyster mushrooms), Ciğer Köftesi [1695] (Fried liver patties with spring onions and fresh herbs), Beyza
Be Cihet-i Börek-i Makiyan [15th
Century] (Chicken Bourek—Puff dough
with chicken, eggs, and fresh herbs); main courses: Mutacana [1539] (Diced lamb with dried apricots,
raisins, honey, and almonds, baked slowly in an earthenware casserole) and
Itırlı Bitkerle Dinlendirilmiş Dana Kebabı [1539] (thinly sliced veal filet, served with aromatic ginger, cinnamon,
and cumin sauce). Not all of the dishes
were great—but some were; and they all were extremely interesting, and all were
quite tasty.
We took a taxi
back to the Four Seasons, and retired for the night.
Day 3: 2 November Monday
Monday began dry! Overcast and cool, but
not raining…yet…
We walked the couple of blocks up Bab-ı Hümayun Cadessi to the entrance to
the Topkapi Palace (Topkapı Sarayı)—the Imperial
(Bab-ı Hümayun) Gate—where we met up with our Urban Age friends from Delhi, Sanjeev and Smita Sanyal, with whom we
shared the rest of our touring this day.
The palace is
huge, and it is stunningly situated on Saray
Point. In the following panoramic
photograph—with the Golden Horn in
the foreground and Eminönü on the
low ground behind it, the Bosphorus
to the left with the Asian side of
Istanbul to the left of that, and the Sea
of Marmara in the background), one gets the view one sees from everywhere
north of the Old City that has a view—from all the way up the Bosphorus. Standing on the highest ground is the
commanding Hagia Sophia (with the Blue Mosque, with its provocative six
minarets, to the right), and everything on the high ground to the left of that
is essentially the
Mehmed the Conqueror (Mehmed
Fatih) built the first stage of the palace on this site shortly after he
took 
made this the site of their palaces until
the 19th century (Mahmut II (r
1808-39) was the last sultan to live in Topkapı), when there began to be a
move to European-style palaces to the north on the shore of the Bosphorus. (Descriptions of those places—Dolmabahçe, Çirağan and Yıldız are included in later
Days’ touring.)
Through the
Imperial Gate, we entered the Court of
the Janissaries. On the left is the Hagia
Eirene (the Church of the Divine
Peace) [at right], built for Justinian
in the 540s. It is almost exactly contemporaneous with the Hagia Sophia (and is
immediately to the left of it in the photo above). It is now completely closed
to the public except on rare occasions when it is open as a concert hall, and
we were unable to get into it—despite my begging, pleading, and attempting to
bribe a guard.
We continued through
this sprawling first courtyard to the Gate
of Salutation (Bâb-üs Selâm)
[at left].
This
Middle Gate (built for Süleyman the
Magnificent in 1524, utilizing Hungarian architects and workers) has
inscribed on it a self-description by Mehmed
the Conqueror:
Sultan of the two Continents, and Emperor of the two Seas, Shadow of God in
this world and the next, Favorite of God on the two Horizons [ i.e., East and
West], Monarch of the
Terraqueous Orb, Conqueror of the Castle of Constantinople, Son of Sultan Murad
Khan, Son of Sultan Mehmed Khan.
This clearly
sounds the
Just outside this
entrance to the Second courtyard is the ticket office for the 
questions
unanswered.)
The Second Courtyard is a much more formal, park-like setting,
surrounded by several large buildings:
to the right are the enormous the Palace Kitchens, and to the
left are the Imperial Council Chamber,
the Inner Treasury, and the Tower of Justice. [In the image at the
right of the
We paid the
separate admission fee and entered the Harem
[a small version of the diagram of this dense complex is at the left; a larger
version, complete with a legend for .svg)
the numbered rooms, is available by
clicking on the image]. Unfortunately, I
know personally nothing about harems, so I shall quote here The Lonely Planet Istanbul City Guide:
The word harem literally means 'private'. Every traditional Muslim household had two
distinct parts: the selamlık (greeting room) where the master
greeted friends, business associates and tradespeople; and the harem (private
apartments), reserved for himself and his family. The Harem, then, was something akin to the
private apartments in
The
women of the Harem had to be foreigners, as Islam forbade enslaving Muslims.
Girls were bought as slaves (often having been sold by their parents at a good
price) or were received as gifts from nobles and potentates. A favorite source
of girls was Cssia, north of the Caucasus Mountains in
Ruling the Harem was the valide sultan, the mother
of the reigning sultan. She often owned large landed estates in her own name
and controlled them through black eunuch servants. Able to give orders directly
to the grand vizier, her influence on the sultan, on the selection of his wives
and concubines, and on matters of state was often profound.
The sultan was allowed by Islamic law to have four
legitimate wives, who received the title of kadın (wife). If a wife
bore him a 
son
she was called haseki sultan; haseki kadın if it was a daughter.
The Ottoman dynasty did not observe primogeniture (the right of the first-born
son to the throne), so in principle the throne was available to any imperial
son. Each lady of the Harem contrived mightily to have her son proclaimed heir
to the throne, to thus assure her own role as the new valide sultan .
As for concubines, Islam permits as many as a man can
support in proper style. The Ottoman sultans had the means to support many,
sometimes up to 300, though they were not all in the Harem at the same time.
The domestic thrills of the sultans were usually less spectacular, however.
Mehmed the Conqueror, builder of Topkapı, was the last sultan to have four
official wives. After him, sultans did not officially marry, but instead kept
four chosen concubines without the associated legal encumbrances, thereby
saving themselves the embarrassments and inconveniences suffered by another
famous Renaissance monarch, King Henry VIII. The exception to this rule was
Süleyman the Magnificent (r 1520-66), who famously married his favorite
concubine, Roxelana.
The chief black eunuch, the sultan's personal
representative in administration of the Harem and other important affairs of
state, was the third-most powerful official in the empire, after the grand
vizier and the supreme Islamic judge.
The rooms of the
Harem are varied and beautiful. At the
right, above, is the Hall of the
Ablution Fountain. At the left,
above, is the Imperial Hall with the
throne of the sultan. (Believed to have been
built in the late 16th Century, this grand room served as the
official reception hall of the sultan as well as for the entertainment of the
Harem. At the right is the Privy Chamber of Ahmed III.
The
richly beautiful Twin Kiosk Apartments
of the Crown Prince [at left, with detail at left below] consists of two
privy chambers, built in the 17th Century. The structure consists of single story, built
on an elevated platform to give a better view from inside and shield views from
the outside. The crown prince lived here
in seclusion; therefore, the apartments were also called kafes
(cages). The space north of the
Apartments of the Crown Prince is the
Courtyard of the Favorites [at right, below], which overlooks a large pool and the Boxwood Garden, and has it
its opposite end the Apartments of the 
Favorites, where the Sultan's favorite
consort would reside. (There seems to be
some debate as to whether the shuttered apartments on the second floor may have
been kafes [cages] for the unwanted brothers or sons of the sultan.)
On the right side
of Courtyard of the Favorites the is
We exited the
Harem into the Third Courtyard, but—as suggested
above—we went back into the Second so as to be able to re-enter it through the
appropriate entrance, the Gate of
Felicity (or Gate of the White
Eunuchs).
We now
entered into the sultan's private domain the Third Courtyard, into which only a
few very important people ever would have been granted entry when it was the
sultan’s palace. [For orientation, there
is, at the right, a small version of a diagram of the second, third, and fourth
courtyards—moving from the second courtyard on the left side of the diagram, to
the fourth on the right; a larger version, complete with a legend for the
numbered areas, is available by clicking on the image]
The Audience Chamber [at left] is located right behind the Gate of Felicity, in order to hide the
view into the Third Courtyard. Dating
from the 15th Century, it was further decorated under Süleyman I. Here
the sultan would sit on the canopied throne and personally receive the viziers,
officials and foreign ambassadors who presented themselves.
Along the right
side of the Third Courtyard are a series of buildings housing the museum
galleries in which many of the Palace’s treasures are displayed. The first of these buildings is the Dormitory of the Expeditionary Force (Seferli
Koğuşu), which houses the Imperial
Wardrobe Collection, a costume collection, including many precious kaftans
of the Sultans. It also houses a collection of ceramic objects.
The next building is
the Conqueror’s Pavilion, which
houses The Imperial Treasury
(constructed by Mehmed the Conqueror in 1460), which contained a vast
collection of works of art, jewelry, and heirlooms of the Ottoman
dynasty—mostly gifts, spoils of war, or pieces produced by palace craftsmen. It
is now a museum used to exhibit these treasures, among are: in the first room, the 
armors
of Sultan Mustafa III, the jewel-encrusted sword of Süleyman the Magnificent,
several Qur’an covers belonging to the sultans, and the Throne of Ahmed I,
inlaid with mother-of-pearl and designed by Mehmed Ağa; in the second room, the tiny Indian figures,
mainly made from seed pearls, the walnut throne of Ahmed I inlaid
with nacre and tortoise shell; in the
third room, two huge gold and diamond candlesticks, each weighing 48kg; in the
fourth room, the Topkapı Dagger, the throne of Sultan Mahmud I.
Adjacent to the
north of the Imperial Treasury lays the pages dormitory, which has been turned
into the Miniature and Portrait Gallery
(Müzesi Müdüriyeti). This is the stuff I was most looking for in the
Topkapi museums—but I couldn’t find it, and no one there could direct me to
it. Perhaps it was closed, or perhaps I
just missed it; but I was devastated that I didn’t get to see it. (Oh, well…next trip!) I was particularly interested in seeing the
illustrated Ottoman histories.
Just to give an idea
of the beauty of these treasures that I was searching for, here are three items
concerning Mehmed II: the Scroll of Sultan Mehmed II (1458) [at
left]; The Portrait of Mehmed II, attributed to Shiblizade Ahmed (ca. 1480)
[at right, above], and, perhaps most fascinating of all, the Sketchbook of Sultan Mehmed II, folios
14b-48a (ca. 1440) [at right, below]—drawings done by the Sultan himself!
The
Neo-classical Enderûn Library (Enderûn
Kütüphanesi), also known as “Library
of Sultan Ahmed III,” [at left] is located directly behind the Audience
Chamber. İznik tiles decorate the
interior.
Opposite the
Treasury on the other side of the Third Court, we entered the Sacred Safekeeping Rooms (Kutsal
Emanetler Dairesi), a set rooms richly decorated with İznik tiles,
housing what are considered to be the most sacred relics of the Muslims. During the empire, this suite of rooms was
opened only once a year so that the imperial family could pay homage to the
memory of the Prophet on the 15th day of the holy month of Ramadan; and this is
still a pilgrimage destination for Muslims.
The entry room contains the carved
door from the Kaaba in
The Fourth Courtyard,
also known as the
A late addition to
Topkapı, the Mecidiye Köşkü,
was built by Abdül Mecit (r 1839-61) according to 19th-century European models.
(Beneath it is the Konyalı
restaurant.) 
West
of the Mecidiye Köşkü is the sultan's Chief
Physician's Room. Interestingly, the chief physician was always one of the
sultan's Jewish subjects. (Some things seem to be universal…) Nearby, is the Kiosk of Mustafa Pasha (Sofa Köşkü). Outside the kiosk, during
the reign of Ahmet III, the
On the west end of
the terrace is the Circumcision Room
(Sünnet Odası) [its interior is pictured at right], used for the
circumcision of young princes. Built by
İbrahim in 1641, the outer walls of the chamber are graced by particularly
beautiful tile panels, many of which had once embellished ceremonial buildings
of Sultan Süleyman I.
The Baghdad Kiosk (Bağdad
Köşkü) [at left] was built to commemorate the Baghdad Campaign of
Murad IV after 1638. The façade is
covered with marble, strips of porphyry and verd antique. 
The marble paneling of the portico is executed in Cairene Mamluk
style. The recessed shelves and
cupboards are decorated with early 16th century green, yellow and blue tiles.
The blue-and-white tiles on the walls are copies of the tiles of the
Circumcision Room.
The gilded İftar Pavilion, also known as İftar Kiosk (İftariye
Köşkü), offers a view on the Golden Horn and is a magnet for tourists
for 
photo
opportunities. Its ridged cradle vault with the gilded roof was a first in
Ottoman architecture with echoes of
After spending
over 4 hours exploring the
Arriving at the docks in the
The rain
diminished, and we proceeded to walk up from the center of the town along Hakimiyet-I Milliye Cadessi, through a
series of different neighborhoods—several 
middle class (upper though lower), and
some working class.
Eventually we
wended our way up to the highest point around (an area called Tabaklar), to the Atik Valide Camii, one of the grandest of the mosques built by Sinan (the master architect of Süleyman
the Great). It was built in 1583 by Murat III for his mother Valide Sultan (Queen Mother) Nubanu (wife of Selim II). It was extremely beautiful, and the four of
us and one friendly guard were the only people in it. It was very reminiscent of Sülemaniye Camii,
with a beautiful courtyard lined with a colonnade and 38 surrounding domed bays. A
central dome flanked by five semi-domes tops the central space, and four
smaller domes top the side bays. [at right, the fountain in the
courtyard of the mosque]
Then we walked
back down to the ferry by a slightly different route. Taking the ferry back across the Bosphorus to
the European side, we had an even a more beautiful crossing: the rain had stopped, and the sun—having made
its first real appearance of our visit, began to sink below the Hagia Sophia
and the Topkapi Palace, looming over Saray Point. From the harbor at Eminönü, we left Sanjeev
and Smita and took the tram back to the Four Seasons.
We took a cab to
the Pera Marmara Hotel, in the
neighborhood of Beyoğlu, where
we met our Urban Age friend Dieter Läpple for dinner at Mikla. Our meal at Mikla was by far the best food we had in
From there were
took a taxi back to our hotel and retired for the night.
Day 4: 3 November Tuesday
The
first day it really wasn’t raining! We
walked past Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque (our regular path); down the main
street of Divan Yolu [at left]—“the
Road to the Imperial Council,” once the imperial road from Constantinople to
Rome; past Çemberlitas (site of one
of Istanbul’s historic Hamams, but unfortunately one you cannot see without
taking a Turkish bath to do so).
We quickly walked
through Grand Bazaar (Kapalıçarşı, meaning “Covered Bazaar”) [at
right], one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world (the world’s
first shopping mall?), with more than 58 covered streets and over 1,200 shops.
Opened in 1461, in the time of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, the bazaar was
vastly enlarged in the 16th
Century, during the reign of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. From there we walked to and through the
smaller, but to me far more interesting Book
Bazaar (Sahaflar Çarsisi),
nestled in an ancient, courtyard between the Beyazıt Mosque and Fesciler
entrance to the Grand Bazaar, and filled with dusty piles of books—antiques and
copies of antiques, Qur’ans and secular books—and pages of illustrations and
illuminations.
We
walked from there to the Beyazit Camii
[exterior at left, interior at right].
Ddating from 1501-1506, it was the second
imperial mosque to be built in the city (after Mehmed the Conqueror's Fatih
Camii) and was the prototype for other imperial mosques—a transitional stage
between the Hagia Sophia (which inspired it) and Süleymaniye Camii (which is a
design more fully accommodating Muslim worship). Beyazit
Camii is quite beautiful, especially its interior, with its rich use of
fine stone—marble, porphyry, and rare granite.
It has an especially lovely garden behind it, containing a soup kitchen
that has been turned into a gorgeous library. We proceeded to walk through Beyazit University (which was a very
interesting experience—our only exposure to campus life in
From there we took the Tram back to Gülhane, and went to the 
(remembering that the Ottomans ruled most
of these places at one point or another).
It houses a copy of the oldest surviving political treaty, the Kadesh Treaty (drawn up in the 13th
Century B.C. between the Egyptians and Hittites). There are also cuneiform clay
tablets bearing Hammurabi's famous
law code. It may not the largest collection of such
ancient Near Eastern art, but it is certainly one of the finest and most
important anywhere. We skipped the 
extensive collection of Hellenic,
Hellenistic and Roman statuary and sarcophagi.
We moved on to the third
building, the Tiled Pavilion of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, built
in 1472 as an outer pavilion of the 
when that city produced the finest colored
tiles in the world. [a selection of
details from four that caught
We returned to
the Four Seasons and checked out, bidding adieu to our first, wonderful home in
We took a taxi
for the ride from Sultanahmet, across the 
Çirağan Palace Kempinski, where the Urban Age was staying for the Conference. This rather huge, modern hotel is attached
the ornate Çirağan Palace,
which had been the grand residence of Sultan Abdül Aziz (r 1861-76), continuing the mid-19th century
tradition of building ornate, western palaces along the Bosphorus, begun
by Sultan Abdül Mecit with his horrendously mannered, ornate Dolmabahçhe Palace, just down the
shore. We had been sad to leave the
small, intimate Four Seasons where we had been so happy…until we got to our
room [interior at right] and saw the view looking out from its balcony [at
left; at far right of this photograph, one can see the Çirağan Palace itself, and, just to the left
of it, Saray Point—on which, on a clear day, we could see the Hagia Sophia!] at
the Bosphorus and Asia beyond.
When we were able to tear ourselves away
from the new-found joy of out new room, we went out for a stroll. We walked up the road to Ortaköy, a lovely little part of town
with cafes and a mosque lining the shore of the Bosphorus [at right], where we
stopped and drank far-too-expensive Turkish coffee along the water’s edge. Away from the Bosphorus, in the center of the
town, there were many stores, little local restaurants, bakeries, shops—and a
busy little dive where I had a delicious döner and a diet coke and Nancy had a
bottle of water—all for 4.50 Turkish Lira ($3).
After walking
around there, we headed back to 
maintained public park. When Sultan
Abdül Hamit II (r 1876-1909) built Yıldız
Şale [at left] (“şale” is pronounced “sha-lay, and thus is a
phoneticized version of “chalet”) as his palace, the park was planted with rare
and exotic trees, shrubs and flowers. It also gained carefully tended paths and
superior electric lighting and drainage systems, designed by French landscape
architect, G. Le Roi. We briefly visited
the Yildiz Sale, at the top of the
park—a 64 room "guesthouse" built by Abdül Hamit in 1875 for two
visits by Kaiser Wilhelm II of 
hills to Çadir Köskü [at right], an ornate pavilion (now an elegant little
restaurant) nestled by a small lake. We walked down from there and back to the
After relaxing a
bit at the
After the reception, we took a taxi with our Urban Age friend Dieter Läpple
to dinner at Borsa Lokantası (Lütfi Kırdar Congress Centre +90 212
232 42 01), in
the upscale neighborhood Harbiye,
not far from
Afterwards, we took
a cab back to our hotel together.
Day 5: 4 November Wednesday
Today was the day
of our six hour Urban Age bus tour of development and re-development of
We left from the Çirağan Palace at 9AM, and from
there drove through Beştikaş
(a transport hub on the Bosphorus, the next area south from the hotel) and Akaretler (an area of state led
gentrification in the 1850s) to the Macka
Valley (site of the People’s Park for Sports and Culture and the
International Conference Center), where we got out to look around. From there we drove through the fashionable
district of Nişantaşı,
then the Fulya valley (site of 1980s
yap-sat buildings and 2000s residential high-rises), through Gayrettepe (site of 70s coop housing),
through Zincirlikuyu (a highway
junction with a Metrobus station), through Akatlar/Etiler
(with its 60s-70s upper middle class housing, which is transforming into gated
communities today), to Karanfilöy—where
we walked around the frozen gecekondu
of the 1950s. We then drove through Levent (garden city of the 1950s-60s)
to the Sapphire Tower, where we had
a chance to go to the top of this residential skyscraper (still under
construction) and enjoy the marvelous view from the top (we could see from the
Black Sea to the
Days 6 and 7: 5-6 November Thursday and Friday
These two days
were completely taken up by the Conference.
Day 8: 7 November Saturday
The Urban Age Conference ended last night with a dinner cruise on a luxury
yacht on the Bosphorus. (Moonlight on
the Bosphorus is pretty spectacular!).
The weather here turned beautiful a couple of days ago—warm and
sunny.
After breakfast
Nancy and I took a taxi into town with Richard and Ruthie Rogers, who just had
time for a quick visit to the Hagia
Sophia. On the way in, I told them
that I had been longing to see the Hagia Sophia ever since I had heard Vincent Scully lecture about it in my
first History of Art course at Yale in 1965—that the image of it had haunted me
for decades, because I had been able to see how transcendently beautiful it
was, and I could understand what Scully had explained about it, but how I
couldn’t quite get my mind to comprehend the actual experience of it. I also told Richard and Ruthie how the night
before on the dinner cruise on the Bosphorus I had mentioned this to Çağlar Keyder (a Turkish academic
who had given one of the major talks on Day One of the Conference, and with
whom I had been deep in conversation about the current political situation in
Turkey) and his wife, and that Çağlar had said that he had taken that same
course that very same year, and that he had similarly been profoundly affected
by Scully’s lecture on the Hagia Sophia!
Richard told me that he and Vince are friends, that respects him
enormously, and that not only were some of the best architects who have worked
for him been trained by Scully, but that some of his best clients were as well! He
said that only at Yale did the sort of person who would someday be a financial
tycoon or a major real estate developer take History of Art courses. (Retelling the whole story to Dan and Joanna
Rose and their daughter Emily and her husband, Art Historian Jim Marrow, two
days after my return to NY, Dan informed me that he had taken that course the
very first time that Vince had taught it—while Scully was still a graduate
student in the early 50s—and that it had affected him more profoundly than any
other course he had ever taken; and Jim told stories of Scully’s kindness to
him and support of him when he was a young faculty member in that department at
Yale.) What an incredible man Vince
Scully is—and what an incredible influence he has had.
We shared an hour
or so drinking in the splendor of the Hagia Sophia together. The brilliance of the sunlight of this
gorgeous day heightened the sublime effect of the light piercing the masonry of
this ethereal space. It is a place I
could spend many, many days in; and it is one of the main reasons I’d be eager
to return to
Nancy
and I made a quick return visit to the Blue
Mosque, primarily to see what the interior looked like with sunshine
streaming in through its many stained glass windows.
From the Blue Mosque, we took the Tram to the Karaköy (Galata) stop in order to take the Tünel, an antique funicular.
[at right] (On our second day of
touring, we had walked up, but I wanted the experience of riding this very
early underground funicular.) Built by
French engineers and inaugurated on 17 January 1875, the Tünel underground
train allowed European diplomats and businessmen to ride between their
waterside offices in Karaköy and their hilltop residences in 
Beyoğlu on steam-powered, gas-lit cars in 90 seconds. It was only the third underground railway
built in the world by that time, and was the shortest.
From the top, we wended our way down toward
the Bosphorus, through winding streets of older European style buildings [at
left], until we came to Trophane, a
more recent, dockside community. In
Trophane, we walked through a rather nice little playground [at right]. On the Bosphorus side of this 
playground, there was the major
Kameraltı Cadessi, with our old friend the Tram running down the center of
it. [In the photograph on the left, you
can see one direction of the Kameraltı Cadessi, the Tram, and a mosque
beyond.]
From the Trophane
stop, we took the Tram along the
Bosphorus two stops to its northern terminus at Kabataş. From there we
walked along the Bosphorus. We walked
past the Dolmabahçe Palace [at
right]. Built between 1843 and 1856 for Sultan Abdülmecid I, the
We continued
along to the next palace, the
Nancy and I spent the next hour and a half
taking advantage of the warm, sunny day by taking a swim in the Çirağan’s
well-heated 
infinity pool, right alongside the
Bosphorus. [at left and right] In
between swims, we sunned ourselves in poolside lounge chairs, looking across
the pool to the Palace building, and to the left of it, in the distance, to
Saray Point with the Hagia Sophia clearly visible on its high ground.
After the pool, I
spent another hour in the hotel’s sauna. [I’ll omit the picture of this!]
That evening Nancy
and I and Dieter Läpple and Gerry Frug took the young staff from the LSE out
for dinner. For this we returned to
Borsa, where we had had a delicious dinner on Tuesday—and the place did not
disappoint on our second visit.
Back at the
hotel, we packed for our departure the next morning.
