Tag: Golden Horn

  • Unplanned urbanization damages Istanbul’s silhouette irreversibly

    Unplanned urbanization damages Istanbul’s silhouette irreversibly

    As Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned mayors against unplanned and improper urbanization, experts have been quick to say that Istanbul’s historic silhouette has been irreversibly and irreparably damaged.

    Erdogan’s critical remarks on Saturday at the Fourth Local Administrations Symposium organized by the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in Ankara turned eyes once again to the ongoing projects in Istanbul that will have a permanent mark on the city’s landscape. Erdogan urged those who think only of “stone and concrete” when it comes to city planning to re-evaluate their ideas and create cities that have “souls and direction.”

    But Today’s Zaman talked to experts who unanimously stated that the damage to Istanbul’s historic silhouette has been done — and they urged authorities to take action against further unplanned urbanization. In 2012, the traditional silhouette of Istanbul, which is comprised of the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace and the Blue Mosque, was marred by a high rise building erected in the district adjacent to the historic peninsula. Currently, a new bridge under construction over the Golden Horn, a mosque on Camlica hill and the rearrangement of Taksim Square are being debated due to aesthetic concerns.

    Architect Ahmet Vefik Alp, a member of the Council for Environment and Urban Planning at the Ministry of Environment and Urban Planning, said mistakes are being made in zoning and urban planning in Turkey and that the country has failed in the subject of architecture. Alp agrees with the prime minister’s warning.

    According to Alp, the bridge being built across the Golden Horn, which ignores the historic Suleymaniye Mosque, is “unacceptable.” Directing attention to a report prepared by UNESCO on the new bridge, Alp says UNESCO’s threat to remove Istanbul’s silhouette from the list of global cultural heritage sites was softened in the Turkish translation of the report. “Such issues will take a toll on Turkey,” added Alp.

    On a similar note, the head of the Istanbul Chamber of City Planners (TMMOB), Tayfun Kahraman, says Turkey continues to build the new bridge on the Golden Horn despite the “warning of UNESCO to include Istanbul’s silhouette on a list of threatened cultural heritage sites.” For Kahraman, what has led to the ultimate damage of the city’s silhouette are the “privileged zoning rights” that are granted unlawfully.

    “Traffic has become much worse due to the construction of buildings above the number of an acceptable limit,” said Kahraman, citing the example of Istanbul’s Esenyurt district. He stated that as they have “already gained rights,” the buildings that have been constructed already cannot be demolished — but further damage could be stopped by preventing new zoning rights.

    According to Kahraman, further unplanned urbanization requires “a strong political will” and the prime minister’s warnings have come as a result of complaints from the public.

    Stating the importance of a “wide consensus” in making construction decisions that could have an impact on the silhouette of the city, Alp said the project concerning the Camlica Hill mosque in Istanbul proceeded as a fait accompli. Although he supports the idea of a mosque on Camlica Hill and participated in the project contest, Alp rejects the idea of repeating the style of Ottoman-era mosques. He thinks that “a big mistake is being made in Camlica.”

    Chamber of Environmental Engineers President Baran Bozoglu believes that Istanbul faces another problem in addition to the damage of its silhouette: greed. He said projects aiming for maximum profit in narrow areas and the money-centered approach of national and international firms have turned the city upside down.

    He called on the government and the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality to reconsider projects such as the Istanbul Canal, a third bridge over the Bosporus, the Golden Horn bridge and the Galataport, a port along the Bosporus, since they would cause even more serious problems than unplanned urbanization.

    via Unplanned urbanization damages Istanbul’s silhouette irreversibly.

  • Da Vinci’s Bridge to Be Built in Istanbul

    Da Vinci’s Bridge to Be Built in Istanbul

    A bridge project reportedly developed by Leonardo Da Vinci for Istanbul’s Golden Horn will be constructed by an international volunteer group as a present to Istanbul, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality has announced.

    Leonardo Bridge

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Oct. 21 during a ceremony to celebrate the arrival of water pumped from the Bosphorus into the Golden Horn that a pedestrian bridge designed by Da Vinci in the 16th century but never realized would be built without any cost to the municipality.

    According to a written statement from the municipality, the first sketches of the bridge, based on an improved version of Da Vinci’s bridge with respect to the latest technology, have been submitted to the Cultural Wealth Protection Committee.

    The statement said the project was the result of collaboration between a group of volunteers from different countries, such as Norwegian sculptor and painter Vebjorn Sand, U.S.-based Turkish physics professor Bülent Ataman, Indian opera writer Daniel Nazareth and international affairs specialist Melinda Iverson. The volunteer group has been working on the project over the last three years.

    Funded by local and international sponsors, the bridge will be 220 meters long, 10 meters wide and 25 meters at its highest point above the sea.

    via Da Vinci’s Bridge to Be Built in Istanbul, 23 October 2012 Tuesday 12:29.

  • Istanbul thrives as the new party capital of Europe

    Istanbul thrives as the new party capital of Europe

    The Golden Horn is booming as the world’s most dynamic city transforms its skyline and artists and students help make it buzz

    Istanbul Beyoglu

    In the run-up to 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 multimillion-pound facelift. In fact, the entire city is in the throes of a multibillion-pound 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, 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 – and if you try to light up, there is a £30 fine.

    At the end of the second world war, when the iron curtain came down to isolate Istanbul from the rest of Europe, only a million people lived here. Since then, the city has increased its population by that amount every 10 years. “Today’s Istanbul is above all an immigrant city,” says Murat Guvenc, city planner and curator of Istanbul 1910-2010, a remarkable exhibition that explains the pace of change. It is housed in santralistanbul – a converted power station more brutally chic than London’s Tate Modern.

    Turkey is already a young country – the average age is 29 – but Istanbul is even younger. People come 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 Alan Berube, director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Programme. “Its economy expanded by 5.5% on a per capita basis, and employment rose an astonishing 7.3% between 2009 and 2010. 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.”

    Economists may be just realising that Istanbul is the place to be. Couch surfers and Erasmus exchange students have known this for some time. If emerging markets are kick-starting the global economy, creative dynamism is ebbing away from the old centres to the new. Istanbul is fast resembling Henry Miller’s Paris or the post-Soviet city-wide party in Prague where western twentysomethings can spend that critical time between university and life. “You just can’t just show up in New York or London and hope to fit in,” says Katherine Ammirati, 23, from Berkeley, California. “At least not without a plan bankrolled by well-heeled parents.”

    She came to Istanbul, doing tutoring jobs and then clerical work at a law firm and will go home one day to become a lawyer herself. “Istanbul still has rich and poor side by side, and that makes it feel like a real city,” she says.

    The international art community, too, has put the city on its nomadic route, drawn in large measure by the success of the privately organisedIstanbul Biennial, which will be held again this September. Sotheby’s recently set up shop in Istanbul, motivated by a new generation of Turkish artists and the new purchasing power of Turkish patrons. In the opening-night crush at Contemporary Istanbul, the city’s late autumn art fair, there was hardly elbow room to lift a glass.

    The frontiers are disappearing. New York galleries are opening up in Istanbul and Turkish collectors go abroad. Art Basel Miami Beach might not feel the competition yet, but the city founded by Constantine as the new Rome in 330 wasn’t built in a day.

    “Istanbul’s biggest problem is that we don’t know what we’re doing right,” says Kasim Zoto, a hotel keeper who sits on the board of the Turkish Hotel Association. In 1955 a Hilton hotel opened up a new modernist skyline across from the Golden Horn and the hillside was soon littered with convention centres, concert halls and more five-star hotels. In the next two years, the number of hotel rooms in the city will rise by a third and two new Hiltons will open.

    Not everyone approves of the consequences of such vertiginous growth. To some, gentrification appears out of control as “real” neighbourhoods, whether those of the Roma community by the old city walls, or the working-class districts around Beyoglu, are bulldozed for redevelopment. Only high-level lobbying last year stopped the city from being defrocked by Unesco as a world heritage site, as a row blew up over plans for an overland rail link for the city’s metro system that would slice the view of the Suleymaniye Mosque.

    The city has so far failed to meet an undertaking to produce an inventory of historic buildings and a master plan to manage the peninsula – all measures that would get in the way of the developers’ axe. Environmentalists feel powerless to stop the construction of a third Bosphorus bridge which, if the precedents of bridges one and two are anything to go by, will lead to the destruction of the city’s remaining green belt.

    Optimists and pessimists over Istanbul’s future tend to be divided along political lines, according to Hakan Yilmaz, a political scientist at the city’s Bosphorus University.

    Those who support the current religious-leaning government are inclined to see the glass half full. It is Turkey’s ardent secularists, now losing their status, who feel less hopeful about the future.

    And while some Istanbulites might see themselves caught up in a clash of civilisations, between the pious and religious and a western-oriented elite, for others it is precisely this tension that makes the city come alive.

    “There is a new culture being born,” says Kutlug Ataman, a Turner prize finalist. The “usual suspects” – the food and the nightlife – are what make Istanbul such an attractive place, he argues, but it’s the pace of change that makes the city so addictive. Having fled the country after the 1980 military coup, he sees Turkey’s transformation evolving, however imperfectly, in the right direction.

    As if to make his point, alongside a retrospective of Ataman’s own work in the Istanbul Modern museum is a celebration of the contribution of Armenian architects to the 19th and early 20th century city, an important step in allowing the city’s remaining Armenian community to reclaim the space they created. “We are becoming more democratic and you feel as an artist that you can make an impact,” Ataman says.

    And if Istanbul feels despondent about surrendering its European capital of culture crown to Turku in Finland, it knows the cloud has a silver lining. In 2012, it will become European capital of sport.

    Andrew Finkel is the author of the forthcoming book Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by OUP

    URBAN RENEWAL

    667 BC City of Byzantium established by Greek colonists from Megara. Named after their king Byzas.

    AD 73 Byzantium incorporated into the Roman Empire.

    330 Byzantium becomes the capital city of the Roman Empire and is renamed Constantinople after the Emperor Constantine, pictured.

    1453 Constantinople captured by the Ottoman Turks, who call it Istanbul after the Greek meaning “to the city”.

    1923 Upon the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, the capital city is moved from Istanbul to Ankara.

    1930 Constantinople is officially renamed Istanbul.

    2010 Istanbul named as one of the European capitals of culture.

    The Guardian