Stephan Lanz
If you make it in Istanbul you can make it anywhere
On urbanites and anti-urbanites, village and metropolis (1)

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The fatalistic statement, "I don't see a chance for Istanbul" (Gülersoy 1988), gets to the core of the way the majority of German specialist magazines interpret Istanbul's current urban development: You have "the beginning of the end of the decline that has already begun" (Arin 1996: 17) and an imminent "explosion of the city" (Kara / Allewedt 1996: 19). Trapped in the claws of an "economy of plunder" and a "theft industry", it appears inevitable that the two-thousand-year-old metropolis must perish. In a "self-destructive dynamics", as Cihan Arin states, the city is bursting in "an uninhabitable agglomeration" of "vast columns of cars and concrete". It is a "mega-space without character, overcrowded by (rural) people" (1996: 4). Present-day Istanbul is stylized as a "shouting, screaming man machine", "out of control", a place where "anarchy, corruption, fraud, poverty, struggle for survival, and violence" prevail (Zwoch 1998: 1994). The "common visions of the cosmopolitan, Istanbul middle classes" are shattered (Arin 1996: 7), the historical "mosaic of cultures" composed of Christians, Jews and Muslims has been replaced by "an explosive mixture of different ways of life" (Zwoch 1998: 1995). A "secret war" is being waged from the gecekondus "against the city" (Kuban 1998: 2032), which is now caught in the trap of fatally threatening, Islamic fundamentalism (Onay 1998). In short, the "fabulous metropolis", the Constantinople transfigured by the Chinese as the "city of cities" a thousand years ago, the centre of civilization in the late Middle Ages that outshone Europe which was sinking into violence at the time (cf. Guillebaud 1998), appears to have mutated into an "Anti-Istanbul", a "terra incognita", the essence of which remains a mystery, according to the historian Dogan Kuban. Only one thing is clear: "This [metropolis of the present] is certainly not a city". (1998: 2032).

Urbanistic horror and doom scenarios of this kind are not limited to Istanbul. They are instead reminiscent of the European view of metropolises of the global South, which for decades have stood for unmanageable pandemonium and the horror of "mass poverty and race riots, traffic chaos and mountains of trash" (spiegel spezial 12/1998). What Istanbul seems to have in common with Mumbai, Dacca or Lagos, which are usually described in this way, is that since the start of migration from the rural regions induced by industrialization, its original size has multiplied - but this was also the case with Western metropolises during their phases of industrialization in the 19th century. Particularly in comparison with the "Third World cities", the embittered urbanistic images of present-day Istanbul come as a surprise, especially since they turn out to be grotesquely exaggerated in view of the city's everyday life. What is, quite to the contrary, unparalleled throughout the world is the successful integration, over decades, of such huge immigration flows without leading to widespread poverty in slums and shanty towns, without cultural and social fissures provoking outbreaks of violence, and without an authoritarian state dirigism, as is the case in Chinese cities: From this point of view, today's Istanbul is a success story that ought to fill urban experts with satisfaction and confidence, even when considering the social, political and environmental costs of this extreme and hardly controlled urban development.

The anti-urbanites
Not only the exaggerated, negatively distorted urban scenarios give rise to scepticism, but also the nostalgic view back to a metropolitan past predating the onset of mass immigration. Istanbul indeed lost a large part of its cosmopolitanism at the latest when non-Muslim minorities were forced to leave the city in the wake of pogroms, leading to its national and religious homogenisation. But one can no longer speak of such homogeneity since the 1990s - the return of cosmopolitanism, though, remains a blind spot in urbanistic reception because it predominantly pertains to the non-bourgeois classes and irregular immigrants (cf., for example, Erder or Esen, "The Pot of Babel", in this volume). The nostalgic view, on the other hand, conjures an urbanity that has come to an end, one that is characterized more by attributes such as bourgeois-individualistic, civilized and well-ordered, and set in contrast to a rural, massive, affect-controlled and chaotic other, which is attributed to the (rural) immigrants and their progeny in today's Istanbul.
This discourse reminds one of the debates in Central European Berlin. For years the urban elites here have been characterizing "urbanity" as a way of life in the European city that is threatening to come to an end. In this context they refer to a romanticized image of the bourgeois, Wilheminian-style city of the 19th century, which they claim was characterized by a cosmopolitan mixture of all groups. But the social differences and extreme living conditions in Wilhelminian Berlin, for instance, are neglected. This discourse is based on the arbitrary construction of an "urban citizen" imagined as the "bearer of urban culture" - as the former Berlin Senator for Urban Development, Strieder, once put it (1998: 11) - an urban citizen characterized by the ownership of property, an independent economic existence and cosmopolitan attitudes.

In a similar way as the elites' present image of "urban Istanbul" excludes the rural immigrants from an imagined urban citizenship, this is done in Berlin by making normative reference to the traditional European city. This exclusion applies both to the industrial workers, whose mass arrival between 1850 and 1920 turned Berlin into a metropolis in the first place, and the "guest workers" who have immigrated since the 1960s. What turns out to be a total blind spot marking this image of urbanity in both cities are the international immigrants of the past years, arriving as refugees, on tourist visas or illegally to stay temporarily or permanently. The conjured urbanity abandoned to alleged decline thus proves to be a selective model, based on the construction of the own - the civilized urban middle classes - versus the alien - the de-civilized, immigrated or proletarian masses - and thus on drawing up a border in an excluding manner.

In Istanbul the cultural gap between urban experts and gecekondus still seems unbridgeable. The urban planner responsible for a local programme set up for demolishing illegal gecekondus and relocating their inhabitants to modernist flat settlements, for example, complained in an interview about their hostile attitude towards the city administration. However, they are merely informed of the upcoming demolition of their dwellings, but not involved in future planning. At the same time, he expressed his admiration of the careful urban renewal in Berlin-Kreuzberg which he was familiar with. When the participatory elements of this renewal were pointed out to him, he said: "That is possible in Germany; people pay taxes there and have a different cultural education. Here, you can't do something like that, people don't trust the state". What he failed to see is that a large part of the population of today's Kreuzberg emigrated from the same regions as the chided inhabitants of his gecekondus. For many Anatolian migrants, Istanbul was an intermediate stop which they left after a few months or years for Berlin. The planner simultaneously expressed his bitterness about politics: For populist reasons, he said, there is not a single party that consistently takes action against illegal gecekondus. Hence, it frequently occurs that a master plan meant to allow controlled settlement is not implemented because, during the planning stage, property still available is already occupied by gecekondus when construction is to begin.

While the Berlin middle classes are able to implement redevelopment programmes, master plans or political regulatory measures with at least partial success so as to secure their power of definition over the contested urban spaces, Istanbul's middle classes seem to have lost their sovereignty over the "urban meaning" (Manuel Castells). Particularly the urbanistic experts, who paradoxically seem to crave for the qualities of a historically evolved, European urbanity as much as they remain attached to the modernist image of total planning predictability, find themselves in a helpless state, trapped between populist politics and hostile inhabitants. Perhaps this explains the hatred of urban structures (or the persons responsible for them) over which one has lost control to the "other", from one's own point of view - to the "Anti-Istanbul".

Yesterday it was the immigrants, today it is the symbol of "Islamic fundamentalism" of their following generations that bundles the "other" like a burning glass, posing a fatal threat to the urban culture. And in this respect, as well, the Berlin and Istanbul elites share a far-reaching consensus: The dangerous virus no longer comes from the outside, it is already on the attack inside the city. In 2004, both in Istanbul and Berlin, the fight against the "headscarf" in the name of a tolerant, urban culture was a symbol of the campaign against the "anti-urbanite".

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