Istanbul: Post-Cultural World City?

"Far below, Istanbul was languishing through an ordinary summer day, reclined across two continents and heedless of the planes buzzing about in her airspace." - Buket Uzuner

The European Union's pick for City of Culture 2010 is not actually in the EU.  Istanbul, the largest city in Turkey, around 20th in the world by metropolitan population, 5th by population of city proper, not only straddles the line between Europe and Asia, but also between progressive omnipolitanism and nostalgic rodomontade, or 'boastful self-investment'.  Istanbul is well-established as an historical powerhouse - once capital of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires.  It is positioned along ancient global trade routes, as a past and current (but future??) industrial, business, and transportation center.  The city ranks among the top ten most-visited cities in the world, a position only to improve from with the impending title of European City of Culture.

There is no question of the city's awareness of it's cultural significance to world heritage.  And there is plenty of evidence that Istanbul is progessing towards a metropolitan makeover, as can be seen in the extensive urban plan for development, the extension of the metrorail system and several special urban projects to be realized throughout the city's expanding territory.  But there seems to be a missed opportunity to regain international stature, beyond cultural means.

For a long time, global attention has been oriented toward the West, long-associated with modernization; but the industrial and technological developments rising from the East have shifted this focus in recent decades.  Whether by forces of globalization, or widespread individual acquisitions of resources, knowledge and information, nations across the globe have achieved a multidirectional global network of Modern.  An ecumenopolis, or continuous system of global relationships.  World as city.

All this presents the necessity that Istanbul rise to it's potential as global omnipolis, implied by its relative and geographic position in the world.  A development of Istanbul not only as a more self-sustained city, but also as an international center.  The growing population, speculated to reach 20-25 million by 2030, does not include the millions of tourists and asylum seekers temporarily inhabiting the city.  What is lacking is the proper infrastructure to accommodate such numbers, and the agencies to assist the thousands of migrants in flux.  As Turkey does not give refugee status to asylum seekers, they are often trapped at the gateway to the EU without the ability to work, to educate their children, nor to participate in the city's growing economy.

The current master plan for future development of Istanbul proposes the establishment of sub-centers radiating out from the historical and existing business centers, to the east and to the west.  Already a 'mosaic' of commercial, industrial, retail, residential, and natural districts, a strategic transit infrastructure must be installed to connect and infuse mobility into the city.  Not only an intercity, intercontinental mobility, but a international mobility, linked to the global network of movement.

Istanbul, layered cake of transit

Poised at the intersection of Asia and Europe, the west and the east, Istanbul is an exceptionally global city.  Whereas Hong Kong and Dubai are commercial hubs populated by ex-patriots that perpetuate their modernization and westernization (assimilation?), Istanbul is at its core multinational.  Its inherent population is one of several nationalities and geographical origins.

At the gate for my departure from Dubai International to Istanbul, I could already sense this distinction.  The people waiting with me represented numerous nationalities, a pluralism which fostered a sense of commonality among us.

The city itself is a fusion of old and new.  Development is rapidly expanding a changing the city, but it is filtered through the historical fabric.  The sound of construction wakes me up each morning in an apartment in Galatasaray, and upon stepping out onto the 3rd floor balcony, I can hear this sound echoing throughout the city as an acoustical signifier of progress.  Other sounds that echo through Istanbul: daily calls to prayer sounding from countless mosques, the horns of ships passing through the Bosphorus, and the occasional thunderstorm which arrives with booming thunder and giant tree-branch lightning bolts.

At the juncture of old and new, local and global, east and west, Istanbul is already a terminal city: a bridge city of the past and future.  Standing at the foot of the bridge connecting the European side to the Asian side, you become presently aware of the massive scale of this connection.  Suspended far above you is a transit hub between continents, that is both daily threshold and critical crossover.  Underfoot, under the Bosphorus, a tunnel project for the expanding metro system is underway to facilitate a public link.  This will create a layered cake of traffic passing through a single point: airplane, automobile, ship, and train all simultaneously connecting east and west.

Dubai

In Dubai, the towers stand like giant insects, eerily aware of their spectators, but silently aloof, with their sparkly exoskeletons, multiple eyes and crane antennas.  Are you watching the towers or is it the other way around?  Their scale dwarfs the older, established city center in Deira and makes the human practically obsolete.  It feels empty even where people congregate, but somehow it seems appropriate.  It is as if there should be no people at all.  A city designed to be abandoned?

I stayed in Deira, a short distance from the recent developments near the marina and Palm Island, across town from the Jebel Ali free zone, where the Al Maktoum airport development is underway.  The location required me not only to cruise the labyrinth of highways in a taxi to get around town, but also to not fully absorb myself in the new Dubai delirium.  In Deira, English is less frequently heard, and the faces on the street are regionally local, as opposed to the international ex-pat population of the newer areas.  The old spice and gold souks inhabit the narrow streets along the creek, which you can cross by boat for 1 dirham each direction.

I took a city tour by car which stopped for photo-taking of the 25-year-old Jumeirah  mosque (surrounded by a picket fence and parking lot), the sail-like Burj Al Arab tower which appears to float on the sea just off Jumeirah beach, Palm Island, the ridiculous Atlantis hotel, and the Deira creek.  These icons represent the postcard image and identity that the city seeks to portray.  They draw maps with nonexistent developments clearly defined, and sell postcards of buildings that after the crisis will probably never be constructed.  Dubai is a sea of half-constructed buildings, that send a confused message, is the city coming or going?

A friend drove me out to the edge of the city, where we hoped to find the proclaimed Global Village and International City (both marked on the city map), which turned out to be a ghostland theme park and a development of identical, mundane apartment buildings with faux architectural ornamentation indicating their nationality of origin.  Traveling along the road to Academic City, we stumbled upon the 4-day line of trucks waiting to dump their contents: the city's sewage, at the one sewage treatment plant.  Dubai has no underground sewage pipe system so, like water they truck into the city, all of the sewage produced by the city's one million inhabitants is trucked out.

On 09.09.09, the city's metro system will open for use, on the same day as the grand opening of the Burj Dubai, currently the world's tallest building.  For a city with an approximate 5 million capacity, the lack of infrastructure and poor planning would pose a huge delinquency if tested to accommodate such a population.  It is a city designed for the car, for the tourist, and most definitely for the sedentary nomad.  The international ex-pat population is assimilated into a singular culture of consumers, as opposed to the native Arab population and custom.  The underlying political structure of nobility dominated by the sheikhs, is on display of wealth and power throughout the city.  Just as numerous as the billboards of Sheikh Maktoum's portrait, however, is the branding of developers such as Nakheel promoting their extravagant projects, both existing, planned and obsolete, along the dusty highways of a city not yet, and perhaps not ever fully arrived.

The Al Maktoum airport development, at one time posed to be the world's largest aerotropolis upon completion, is also in a questionable state.  Originally planned to be a large cargo terminal, then planned as an Airport City development in complement to the existing Dubai airport, already impressive, but now another uncertain future for the city.  The transient state of a city built for temporary residence, tourist indulgence, and instant gratification, is articulated by the ever-present air traffic in the sky above, reminding those on the ground that this place is less a destination, than a hub of coming and going.

Taxi drivers are nervous.  There has been a huge decrease in the number of commuters on the road since the economic crisis stimulated a mass exodus out of the city.  Like the skyline of partly constructed towers, cranes frozen in perpetual flux, Dubai's future is uncertain.  You wouldn't read it on the surface, but cracks exist that suggest a shallow future.  Maybe even a past future.

To quote from JG Ballard's "High Rise", which I so appropriately began reading while in Dubai: "Part of its appeal lay all to clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence."

India

India has so many people.  They are so clearly divided into a high and low class, you wonder if they even see eachother.  The friction is in the streets, where cars, people, rickshas, cows, elephants, camels all come together in a chaos of movement.  Yet life seems to be lived at a slower pace than more modern cities.  Maybe it is the unbearable heat, or the lack of efficient systems of infrastructure (as we know it in the west) which causes a sedate, more contemplative lifestyle.

I arrived to Mumbai, where you emerge from the airport under billowing white pavilion structures and are immediately on display to a crowd of anticipation.  Once I located my driver, we embarked on what would be a 2 hour car ride to travel the 25k or so to the Churchgate area, not including the half hour stop on the side of the road after the air conditioning broke and thus required entire vehicle replacement.  I reunited with a college friend, and architecture colleague, Danika, who took me to dinner at a restaurant designed by another former Wash U architecture grad.  The next day, I explored Churchgate on my own, visiting the Gate to India, the Prince of Whales museum, and the Taj hotel, site of the terrorist attacks last year.

My domestic flight to Ahmedabad arrived at nearly 1 in the morning, where my cousins and their spouses (or spouse-to-be) greeted me at the airport.  In the back of Sachin's car, Missy announced their engagement and informed me of a family gathering the next day to celebrate the event.  Sachin's mother was generous to lend to me a vintage sari to wear for the occasion, and assisted Missy, Jackie, and me in dressing the next morning.  It was a beautiful day, which ended with a catered party with friends at a house Sachin designed.  Though Gujarat is a dry state, tourist alcohol licenses for Kevin, Jackie, and me provided added festivities for the celebration.

The next day we took a road trip to Udaipur, city of lakes, except for during drought season (which was while we were there), when the water is dried up and the lakebottom is instead a farming ground or athletic field.  Low season allowed us to stay in a fabulous hotel for 800 rupees (about 12 dollars).  We visited City palace as well as perused the many silver jewelry and leather stores.

Back in Ahmedabad, we settled into a routine of morning tea at Sachin's family's beautiful apartment, situated with an outdoor terrace overlooking a grass field owned by a local temple (a rarity in such dense population).  In addition to several delicious meals from different regions of India, while in the city I saw many of Ahmedabad's architectural claims to fame, such as the Sarabai house, City museum, and Millowner's building by Le Corbusier and the Indian Institute for Management by Louis Kahn.  Sachin also gave a tour of the architecture school where he studied, which has an incredible campus of which I am jealous.

My stay in India was colorful, delectable, dusty, and gold-flecked.  There are so many more places to experience in India, especially Delhi and Hyderabad, which are currently sites of extensive airport developments, but next time I will come back in the wintertime. :)

Hong Kong

On Hong Kong Island the horizontal expansion of the city is limited by water and mountains, so the city grows vertically and also folds over on itself.  A central corridor of stairs and escalators weaves through a narrow street passage up the hillside, hovering above street level, below the tower level, in a tier of marketable urban space.  It is the axis of the entire city.

My stay in HK was marked by several brief sling-shot excursions away from the city.  Upon my arrival, my friend Yvette and I crossed over the Kowloon side by ferry.  The next day we took a further leap by ferry to Macau.  On my own time, I took the train all the way to the Shenzhen border and another day to Lantau, where a complex of outlet malls, tourist attractions, and luxury condominium towers is being developed adjacent to the airport.  The architecture seems to be oriented towards the terminal and views of planes landing and taking off return the experience to the once spectacle of past airport viewing decks.

Our nights in Hong Kong usually consisted of a fantastic meal, ranging from traditional Chinese to Portuguese infusion to do-it-yourself 'hot pot' (Chinese fondue).  Yvette and I also took in the city by riding around on the trolleys, enjoying rooftop cocktails, climbing atop the Peak for a panoramic skyline view, and wandering the streets.  David Erdman and Clover Lee of davidclovers, for whom Yvette is interning this summer, also offered some insight into the city and its architectural community, including a peek into the thesis projects reviews at Hong Kong University.

Hong Kong is a spectacular city where everything is clean and efficient, yet the streets have not lost their grittiness nor their chaos.  Just go to Mong Kok or Causeway Bay.  Puddles on the ground imply something dripping from above and buildings are tangled together in a web of pedestrian skyways.  To avoid the streets, people travel by bus, train, and the historic trolley (still just 2HKD flat rate!) to get around.  Fashion is key, and just about every office tower is a mall at the base.

statement about the aerotropolis

Above you see a map of the current state of world aerotropolises, with my travel path marked in purple.  Over the next two months, I will be chasing these omnipolises, existing and future.  My destinations include Hong Kong, India, Dubai, Istanbul and Amsterdam.  My interest is to develop the thesis of a future terminal city that accommodates those in transit and those immobilized in a new urban architecture.

As a symptom of globalization by mobilization, the terminal building, formerly an isolated object at the periphery will become the city center of a new kind of city. As Paul Virilio recently stated: 

All this will produce a complete overhaul of sedentariness and nomadism.  Sedentary people will be at home everywhere: in hi-speed trains, in jets, in lifts, with their mobile phones and their laptops. Nomads will be at home nowhere: they’ll be out in the street, in tents, in transit camps. All this will call the city, world settlement, into question. Railway stations, airports, ports will become the real city centers, but of a different city. An ultracity: ultraville. A city no longer metropolitan but omnipolitan - meaning, it will be wherever things are moving, wherever people are in flux, displaced, deported.

I am interested in 3 main aspects of the terminal city project: 

1. the conditions of sedentariness and transit, manifested at the urban scale

2. the context of the global city of Istanbul, in the ensemble where EAST meets WEST

3. the form of the architecture which accommodates the above stated condition

To borrow terms from the Platform for a Permanent Modernity, these interests can be restated:

1. the territorial infrastructure of the terminal city

2. the urban complex of Istanbul as a microcosm of global settlement flow and flux 

3. the building as architectural object which is at once urban monument and self-city

...with these interests and ideas, I will interrogate my destinations for clues as to how the future transitport for Istanbul becomes.  My plan of attack: cultural experiences, social interaction, transportation, and organic exploration.

Istanbul, more specifically

from travel proposal:

Virilio’s statement implies an overhaul of urbanism: ‘globalization by mobilization’. Cities will soon develop around transit hubs, where people are constantly displaced, mobile and immobilized.  Interestingly, one of the world’s oldest cities of paramount historical significance is also currently embodying this future city of displaced populations: Istanbul, Turkey.

The implication of Virilio’s ‘omnipolitan city’ is that urbanism will be defined by mediation between populations in transit and populations immobilized.  This condition already exists throughout Europe in airport detention zones where people seeking asylum, awaiting entry or deportation, coexist amidst flows of travelers, migrants, and nomads.  This localization calls into question the political, ideological and experiential differences between these displaced people.  In the omnipolitan city of transit, Istanbul today, this condition is woven into the urban fabric.

Istanbul currently accommodates significant migration and tourism flows as well as a large population of people in flux awaiting entry into Europe. Thousands of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the former Soviet republics and Africa often spend several years in the city awaiting entry into the EU.  Often these displaced populations, legal and illegal, experience the same living and working conditions and localities.  Additionally, the rapidly expanding city of approximately 12 million continues to draw tourists into this urban mixture.  A nondiscriminatory condition of ‘encampment’ characterizes Istanbul’s multinational and increasingly global identity, and is manifest in individual neighborhoods throughout the city.

“[Accommodating] migrants and refugees and fighting irregular and transit migration through its territory are two opposing poles of the challenges that Turkey is currently facing regarding its migration regime. On the one hand, we have to recognize the needs of “strangers” who had to leave their countries and ended up here. But on the other hand, turning into a “gatekeeper” for “Fortress Europe” has become an undesirable yet probable scenario for Turkey.” – Brewer & Yükseker, 2005