ISTANBUL – In the run-up to the New Year, the tourists were haggling over Louis Vuitton and Prada rip-offs in Istanbul’s fabled grand bazaar. But in the high-rise shopping centres on the other side of town, bargain hunters in the winter sales are battling to get their hands on the real thing.
Istanbul’s covered market, an early shrine to shopaholism, is about to celebrate its 550th anniversary with a multi-million-pound facelift. In fact, the entire city is in the throes of a multi-billion-dollar makeover, as what was once an outpost on the edge of Europe rebrands itself as a regional magnet.
The city is buzzing. Only a few years ago, when residents spoke of millennium domes it was not the O2 venue for the latest Lady Gaga concert they had in mind but the thousand years separating the Church of Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque on the skyline of the city’s historic peninsula. But now there are new skylines.
At the European entrance to the Bosphorus bridge, work goes on through the night on the Zorlu Centre, a hotel-arts-shopping-residential-office complex. It is just down the road from the Sapphire skyscraper, which advertises itself as Istanbul’s tallest building and with a strong arm you could throw a stone at the new Trump Towers.
“Istanbul is a country, not a city,” says its Mayor, Mr Kadir Topbas, and the explanation of its modern boom is buried in the history of the past 30 years. In 1980, Istanbul could not afford the electricity to illuminate that famous skyline. The city, along with the rest of Turkey, was under martial law and there were midnight curfews and even shortages of Turkish coffee.
Since then the city has elbowed its way into the global economy. The backstreet clip joints in the European neighbourhood of Beyoglu have turned into boutique hotels, fusion eateries and world music clubs. The smoke-filled coffee houses whose patrons once scrounged for the price of a glass of tea, now serve lattes.
“Today’s Istanbul is above all an immigrant city,” says Mr Murat Guvenc, city planner and curator of Istanbul 1910-2010, a remarkable exhibition that explains the pace of change. People go there to work and often retire somewhere else. And if Turkey is notoriously poor at getting women into formal employment, nearly half of them work in Istanbul.
A recent study by the Washington-based Brookings Institution, in a joint investigation with the LSE Cities project, judged that Istanbul had beaten Beijing and Shanghai to claim the title of 2010’s Most Dynamic City.
“Istanbul takes the top ranking for economic growth in the past year,” wrote Mr Alan Berube, director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Programme.
“Its economy expanded by 5.5 per cent on a per capita basis, and employment rose an astonishing 7.3 per cent between 2009 and last year.
“Turkey’s banking sector, which was less invested in risky financial instruments, became a safe haven for global capital fleeing established (and exposed) markets during the downturn.” The Guardian
via TODAYonline | World | Istanbul judged to be 2010’s Most Dynamic City.