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Index Self Service City: istanbul | Imprint |
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Orhan Esen |
As the process of modernisation progresses, the gap between the practice of the material production of Istanbul and the practice of discourse production has continuously widened. Istanbul today is a city without language, which has no appropriate apparatus to provide insight into its own urban reality. The established educational elite has failed to learn from and with the city they live in and its productive processes. A key aspect in this context has been the understanding and evaluation of spontaneous processes in town planning and housing development, which began in 1945 and intensified after 1950. These practices generally are summarised under the generic term gecekondu although the phenomena it stands for today - more than half a century later - are of a greatly varying nature. For traditional modern planners, Istanbul had been no playground to let off steam. Consequently, the city kept shifting away from the disappointed planner's focus of attention. In the wake of its most recent industrial coming-of-age it disappeared altogether from panels discussing the trends around present-day cities. The local urbanist conceived the situation as an "accident" which, hopefully, was soon to be remedied. This resulted in some kind of tacit self-banishment from international debates about urban developments. To discuss Istanbul against the background of comparable urban patterns in the Third World was considered to be outright disgracing. The very low level of attention the city on the Bosporus is attaining in international research and discussion is closely linked to local experts' misconception of their own reality, to an inner distance, to the rejection or non-acceptance of a surroundings they collectively built with their own hands. The only term now available to describe their own case is çarpik kentlesme, "obstructed or distorted urbanisation". This kind of viewpoint, which renders invisible one's own environment, does nothing to make one feel at ease in it nor does it promote one's understanding of it. It is now fashionable to speak of the "incomprehensibility" and "inexplicability" of Istanbul's more recent urbanity. The unexpected New Istanbul, which emerged within the space of one generation, caught the locals by surprise. In an attempt to overcome one's own speechlessness, the term "uniqueness" came in to explain it all: A catastrophe of such scale has happened only to us. Istanbul had been unique as a historical venue - a claim which needed no proof - and so its final decline was to be unique as well. In this way, Istanbul inevitably got caught by its own past, and kept drifting into the sphere of influence of the orientalists, whose paradigms proved to be attractive for disappointed modernists. According to them, one should be content with the pathos of a glorious past until the day the city will have been cut to size again and made presentable by planners and investors. Western-orientalist ways of perception increasingly dominated the local educated elite's "true feeling" for their city. Symptomatically, the "North Istanbuler" as a historic character is difficult to tell from a western tourist in many districts. So the restructuring of historic city centres is a very topical issue, which is given priority by the post-Islamist / neoliberal city government (AKP) voted into office in March 2003. Whoever talks about Istanbul in public usually refers
to the capitalized Istanbul, which is perceived through its geopolitical
as well as cultural and civilizational significance: It is the imperial
Istanbul of the Romans, the Byzantines and the Ottomans - i.e.,
the urban period between the declaration on Nova Roma (330
AD) and the breakdown of the Ottoman multi-ethnic empire at the
end of World War I. Given its alleged position between two counterpoints
of cultural history - using phantasms like "Orient" and
"Occident" - the Bosporus city appears to be the ideal
projection surface for all kinds of stereotyped comments, where
one in three sentences contains the word 'bridge'. On the genesis of the north-south
dichotomy in Istanbul's early modern age In the context of an imperial public building programme, this first wave of modernization blessed Istanbul with the usual inventory of urban achievements, lending it an image similar to that of its "western sisters". As opposed to the "textbook cases", however, the city failed to produce the usual mix of continued rural exodus, industrialization and urbanization. Istanbul's metropolitan area expanded into newly built housing projects and suburbs, without any sustained increase in population. More importantly, this population was now divided by income and culture. Over the periods to follow, this duality was to reproduce itself in a slightly varied fashion, thereby creating its own spaces and patterns of perception and behaviour. The so-called "North-Istanbulism" has been a way of looking at the deserted (southern) city from the north now believed to be safe. As this perspective kept reproducing itself over the years, it became a major impediment to a reality-based, "normal" self-reception of Istanbul's urbanity. This separation of the ways of living and thinking also paved the way for the post-1950 "reception catastrophes", which intensified after 1990 when the modernization process was accompanied by rural immigration into the big city, as had been the case in western societies a hundred years ago. The real-life modernization was bad news for the upper and middle classes, who had become fully westernised meanwhile. Although the city had no "true" bourgeoisie for reasons inherent in Turkey's history of becoming a nation-state, a corresponding middle-class attitude was adopted mainly by the leftist educated elite - the "reserve bourgeoisie" - and intellectualised, reproduced and passed on to the plutocracy emerging in the nineties. From 1945 / 50 on, an entirely new city has been emerging on Istanbul's soil. It would be no exaggeration to call it a "new foundation". The educated northern residents who observed the process never tired of emphasizing its inconsistency with the historic city - a rift which was almost always rated negative. The main feature of the great transformation is generally said to be the informal practice of urban production. This is however not an era-specific invention, nor can it be attributed to "land-taking peasants" alone. On the contrary, it continues a line which started with the precarious building practices of the upper class of the founding era in "Boomtown Pera". Given the semi-legal or altogether illegal customs of the time (e.g., appropriation of public land for private building activities), this district - which is en vogue again while being affected by gentrification - might rank as the historic precursor of the "gecekondu settlements". The "Istanbul model" has been successful under certain aspects, i.e., in the context of informal self service urbanization. Starting in the 1945 / 50 period, an urbanization model involving a host of mainly small actors was taking shape on the soil of Istanbul. As the many participants' integration in the urban production was made legitimate at a relatively early point in time, the city within decades experienced some kind of "urbanization offering profit sharing" for comparatively many, especially for early arrivals. This made it much easier to cope with an extremely rapid urbanization, which probably would have been very traumatic had it taken a different course. Another benefit was the provision of housing, safety and protection from inflation. Until 1980 the process remained relatively free from superordinate governmental regimentation or from capitalist interventions. In this phase of the "urbanization of work" (Sengül), concepts such as "development of new land in solidarity", "establishment of municipality" or "urban production for utility value" were at the centre of attention. By way of contrast, typical designations of the post-1980 neoliberal era were "mafia-like client networks" or "urban production for exchange value" (ibid.). The latter phase of "urbanization of capital" (ibid.), which selectively offered specific immigrant circles an option for advancement into the urban middle class while it excluded others, produced relative and absolute losers. This is the origin of today's "dual city" ( Bilgin, Doppelstruktur …).
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