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Index Self Service City: İstanbul | Imprint |
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Stephan Lanz |
"Either you find a hold or you go under..." Surprisingly, the basic perceptions of the city expressed in the interviews were extremely similar, regardless of the place of residence, class, milieu and origin: "I like living in Istanbul very much. There's this song by Frank Sinatra about New York, 'If I can make it there, I can make in anywhere'. In my opinion you could say the same of Istanbul. It is without doubt difficult to live here ... but it's fun. It's a city that offers many opportunities", a German woman married to a native doctor, who has been living in Cihangir for twenty years, told me, while a service worker who grew up in Kustepe stressed: "Istanbul is like Alice in Wonderland, a nice way to live", only to add: "It's difficult to live in Istanbul. You have to develop your own abilities". A taxi driver from Cihangir confirmed that "you have to try to survive on your own. ... If you can't manage that, you're in a fix". A female employee who just lost her job - she immigrated to Cihangir from east Anatolia 40 years ago - added: "You have to develop a strong personality to be able to grasp all the complex situations". "In Istanbul you can't dip your toe in the water to see if it's warm or cold, you simply jump in and try to swim. Either you find a hold or go under", said an internationally renowned photographer who emigrated from the country in 1971. A young mother from Kustepe stated: "You must be strong and have money ... Istanbul is as dangerous as a problem child. You never know what will happen". A female student whose ancestors had lived in Istanbul for generations stressed: "The Istanbul lifestyle is very fast, you have to be flexible" and "it's very hard to live here". All interviews paint a highly ambivalent and controversial picture of a city that is simultaneously considered "aggressive and egoistic", "crazy" and "merciless", "complex", "unfathomable" and "chaotic", but also "fun", "lively, beautiful and colourful". "Job opportunities, life, entertainment, Istanbul means everything to me", is how a young woman born in Kustepe and working as a cleaning lady at Bilgi University sums it up. The interviews present a city offering all opportunities as long as one is able to make use of them, while providing no social welfare nets apart from personal, social relationships: Toughness, the ability to assert oneself, flexibility, or also money are required to live in this city. It doesn't come as a surprise that all interviewed academics and artists from Cihangir or Kuzguncuk are familiar with other European metropolises - and all of the others are not. It is interesting that a comparison with cities such as Paris, London or Berlin by no means leads to noticeably different assessments of Istanbul than with those who are not acquainted with these cities: It is often stressed that in Istanbul everything is in a permanent state of flux (as a scientist of Bilgi University living in Cihangir pointed out), that spaces and biographies in Istanbul are more open and less defined, and that for this reason greater development opportunities exist than in large Middle European cities. What is often emphasized - for example when making a distinction to the rather repressive culture in eastern Turkey - is the tolerance in Istanbul, but also the way in which different groups are ignorant of each other. "All people coming here from their cities bring along their culture. We have a sweet dish called aschure - into which you put everything you have in the kitchen cabinet. Sadly, the cultures in Istanbul do not mingle, everyone sticks to their own", is how the already mentioned photographer put it. A frequent assumption was not confirmed, though, namely that only the cosmopolitan elites move about "freely" in the city and make use of its offers of culture and consumption, while the poorer and less educated gecekondu dwellers limit themselves to their area and ignore the metropolitan character of the city: "For me, Istanbul is a city with a great history. ... It's a beautiful city", says a jobless person who emigrated from the shore of the Black Sea to Kustepe forty years ago, while a female service worker who was born in the gecekondu states: "In my leisure time I usually go to Besiktas, Kadikoy or Taksim". It is less the attitude towards the city that seems to restrict the freedom of movement than the personal economic situation: "It's difficult to leave this quarter because we don't have the money", a young mother from Kustepe regrets. All in all, the statements represent the classical image of a metropolitan culture as it has been repeatedly described by urban studies since Georg Simmel, Robert Park or Louis Wirth: a culture predominantly characterized by ambivalence and ambiguity. Both longings and fears were always equally oriented towards the city: Longings for limitless opportunities and individual freedom, for liberality and social advancement, for stimulation and diversity. In contrast there is the fear-ridden myth of the urban jungle, where chaos and disorder, corruption, crime and moral reprehension prevail, where there is the danger of falling into the abyss of social anonymity if one's increasingly risky life proves to be unsuccessful. And this culture manifests itself in the figure of the alien, the immigrant. The alien "who comes today and stays tomorrow" (Simmel 1908) lies at the heart of every definition of urbanity (Siebel 1997). His socially emancipative potential originates in the ambivalence that results from spatial closeness and simultaneous social and cultural distance and allows one to reflect on what is considered one's own when encountered. But at the same time, identitary delimitations of such a notion of the "own" and racist dispositions of the majority society produce defence reactions against groups perceived as alien. According to Zygmunt Bauman, the alien poses a threat to the social order because the person who cannot be classified in the usual categories of a society disrupts the familiar antagonism of friends and enemies: "The threat he brings along is more dreadful than what one fears of an enemy." (1991: 25) He is neither friend nor foe, but could be both: Aliens "bring what is outside to the inside and poison the comfort of order with the distrust of chaos". (ibid.: 26) Now the fierce defence against the immigrants labelled as rural, backward and homogenous reverts precisely to the claim that they destroyed the cosmopolitan culture of Istanbul, meaning the coexistence of strangers, which, in turn, defines urbanity. As long as they belong to the same milieus - a Western-oriented middle class - not the members of other nations or religions mark what is alien in the bourgeois, cosmopolitan city (which doesn't mean that they are always protected against racist attacks, however). What is understood as alien, in this context, is instead that which counts as rural as opposed to urban, as backward as opposed to modern. And this alienness has apparently poisoned the comfort of an urban order that is now transfigured in nostalgic memories. Academic urbanists who still interpret Istanbul along the lines of the duality between the own, embodied by the "cosmopolitan citizen", and the other, marked as "rural immigrant", thus themselves undermine the qualities of an urban culture which they continuously call for: They are the true anti-urbanites, because urbanity means ambivalence and ambiguity as opposed to such a duality. However, contemporary everyday life in Istanbul, in which these central pillars of urban culture appear to be lived and reflected on as a matter of course, have long made such "experts" irrelevant.
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