my two kuruş

First, a circumcision block party:

I was loath to use Hipstamatic out of photographic snobbery but it really does make everything look cooler. I almost wish I had shot the whole Tarlabaşı project on my phone. Here’s one shot with my film camera:

Boys are usually dressed up in little prince outfits complete with white cape, scepter, and flumed mitre, but in this case they went with a more trendi look.

Anyway, on to what I think should have been done instead of buying out owners, kicking out renters, and demolishing wholesale. DISCLAIMER: I’m approaching this as a complete amateur with no backgroun in urban sociology or planning, so what I write might be either stating or overlooking the obvious to people who have given these matters more thought.

Quite simply, I think property owners should receive subsidies to fix up whatever could be fixed, required to themselves demolish uninhabitable buildings and given money to do so. If it were individual owners who themselves lived in the area doing the renewal, you would never see what you see now: buildings forcibly vacated with their facades ripped off but then left to rot for six months or more now, with looters stealing anything of value—windows, doors, wires, etc.—and fires occasionally lit by who know who. 

Buildings facing the main boulevard with their facades ripped off are now used to dump garbage and as latrines. Below, a man peeing in one of them:

There are now police stationed on vacated streets after dark.

And of course if it were a bunch of individual small-time property owner restoring and then reaping the benefits instead of getting bought out for a trifle by a contractor will make an enormous amount of money, the distribution of profits would be much fairer. And they would most likely hire small businesses they knew from their own social networks to do the actual restoration work, again distributing wealth more equally than the system of contractors and subcontractors skimming off the top and paying workers minimum wage.

In that way Tarlabaşı could become the next Cihangir, an area once dilapidated but now something like the Greenwich Village of Istanbul, or another Kasımpaşa, the neighborhood to Tarlabaşı’s southwest that was known for being tough when Prime Minister Erdoğan was growing up there but is now a nice middle-income area where children still play in the streets and neighbors know each other.

One I took in Cihangir back in 2007:

And Kasımpaşa, though you can't tell much from afar:

Admittedly I have little idea how Cihangir actually turned into what it was, beyond what I was told by two Turkish girlfriends of American expats at an expat bar (with a Nat Geo Wild episode on giant monitor lizards on the flat screen in the background distracting me from the conversation). They said that there was indeed not any grand project in the neighborhood, just a bunch of property owners realizing the potential of their location and investing in renovations.

Some property owners I talked with two years ago told me that for years they had been seeking permission from the municipality to do restorations on their own, but hadn’t gotten it, they suspected because the municipality wanted Tarlabaşı looking as decrepit as possible to justify exercising eminent domain to auction the land off to a private contactor (in this case Berat Albayrak, the prime minister’s son-in-law) to the demolish blocks en masse. Others had gotten permission, and a few buildings outside of the demolition zone had scaffoldings up with owners doing renovations in anticipation of increasing property value when the renewal project is complete–perhaps a positive effect of the project.

Yet when I have run my ideas by Istanbulites, I’ve without fail been greeted with incredulity. Why would the politicians do that? A grand project provides much greater opportunity for them to line their pockets. 

A big part of what gives Istanbul its character is that it doesn’t look like it was built according to some rational design—instead you see civilizations and ideologies layered on top of each other and side by side in the architecture. But in places like Tarlabaşı and Sulukale they are building regimented block housing “reminiscent” of late Ottoman styles, tearing down actual authentic late Ottoman buildings for self-consciously “authentic” developments. See the Tarlabaşı Yenileniyor image gallery.

Since I was last in Istanbul a big new shopping center has opened. I don’t have the architectural vocabulary to describe it properly, but it looks like it has been built to match tourists’ notions of Istanbul as a “bridge between East and West,” complete with loopy gold script on the front sign meant to be reminiscent of Ottoman script, rather than anything else that actually exists in the city.

Although if I step back from all this I guess in a few decades these buildings will be yet another weird and interesting relic--mixed in with those built to demonstrate imperial grandeur or to make Turkey look like Europe because Europe was modern and if it looked the same as Europe so would Turkey—of an era when city planners were trying to recreate authenticity, as much as anything as means of generating consent for demolishing actual history.

Intended for an internal audience rather than tourists but also gross is this:

Folktale hero/buffoon Nasreddin Hoca is usually depicted riding backwards on a donkey, but here on the façade of the state TV children’s channel’s headquarters they’ve dressed him up in white fur-lined red as a poor man’s Santa Claus, an authentic Turkish Santa instead of just his own thing.

My penultimate evening in Istanbul I watched an amazing film called Ekümenopolis about the transformation of Istanbul, which made many of the above points better than I have. It was a bit simplistic in its Marxist boiling down of everything to class struggle, but nonetheless is great/shocking in showing the cozy relationship between the TOKİ housing administration and contractors, how Istanbul became a congested driving city, and how those evicted have subsequently gotten screwed out of their promised public housing (e.g. by demanding they put down a 15,000 lira deposit before moving into their subsidized housing, where most families had only one working breadwinner getting paid 600-800 lira a month). The film ends on an unsatisfying “just say no” note of protesters organizing to resist. I suppose my recommendation for change is also unsatisfactory as far as addressing the systemic issues (hence friends’ incredulity at my naïveté) but instead of calling for bottom-up popular resistance I’m advocating top-down tweaks: policymakers should just do a better job thinking things through before giving into grand schemes and think more about helping the little guy. Eh.