ISTANBUL HYPERCITY: Harking Back in Anger: Meta-nostalgia for ISTANBUL long forgone
Why do people live in New York? … There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.
Jean Baudrillard
Renegade French critic Jean Baudrillard’s statement on New York equally applies to Istanbul. It would not have been a great surprise to see Baudrillard to have grown an interest in the multi-storey gated communities popping up around Istanbul lately, each of which, if you believe the publicty hype, are unique embodiments of a different “outstanding concept”, but in effect impose a dull standardized lifestyle on the masses of Istanbul’s new middle-classes. It will remain a mystery whether Baudrillard would have included any of them in his book “The Perfect Crime”, but it is almost certain that he would find Istanbul’s “themed development projects” curious. A note for those readers who may not be familiar with Istanbul: there has been an increasing number of “meta-nostalgic” gated community projects flourishing at the periphery of Istanbul simulating “the city center” and it’s iconic sights, namely the “Bosphorus yalıs” (waterfront mansions) and her ancient neighborhoods or what remained of them. It should be fair to render these projects as meta-nostalgic – a nostalgia for nostalgia itself- in the context of a rapid erosion of references. They feature all the comfort, security and planning that the “new middle classes” demand. Advertised daily in the newspapers, they are believable simulations insofar as they resonate with the image of Istanbul in one’s head, and creative insofar as they are believable.
To what degree, then, the image (Istanbul imagined) matches the original it refers to? Lets put the question this way: how objective is the relationship between the Istanbul one lives in and the Istanbul one thinks he/she lives in?
Observed from a satellite-imaging program, say Google Earth, human settlement on the both sides of this ‘sea-cum-river’ is rather a rational choice — in the anthropological sense of the word at the least. Istanbul stands out as one of the most unique spots on earth where man and nature could coexist in utmost harmony. However, once zoomed in a bit closer one cannot help but immediately notice the ugly, under-regulated developments in the midst of the lush vegetation decorating the continental waterfronts of the Bosphorus. And there is more to the grim picture sketched above: gigantic oil tankers cruise their ways to open seas out of the Bosphorus strait, suspended bridges connect continents with a futuristic arrogance, and high density regions of human settlements press as they expand as if they wish to seal seamlessly the water filled gap between the continents. Leaving behind the glass-screen, one faces another striking perception of reality: there is no connection between the image of the city and the mundane unfolding of life in this city.
A long while ago Istanbul has been morphed into a “zone of capital ”, a subsystem of the dominant global capitalist system. It has become an “erogenous zone”, whose natural beauty and historical and cultural sights stimulates amorous flows of capital. It is limitless, vulnerable, and has lost its urban qualities and character.
Istanbul is nothing less than a hypercity, whose inhabitants have no strong or meaningful connection with each other, other than “the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together” as Baudrillard put it. Lacking “raison d'être”, it ticks mechanistically. With some exceptions, the simple reason for most people to be here is no other than that they can’t imagine otherwise. The members of this society refrain from one another; hesitation sets in and sets the tone of the social dialogue. Global capitalism could not dream of a better stock of human population. What constitutes a fertile soil for the roots of the ferocious capital plant than a population whose primary motive is to survive to consume, and consume to survive?
Let us ask, how real is the image of Istanbul in our minds? Could it be the product of an escapist reflex to evade the erratic life styles we are trapped in? Most habitants of the city are scarcely in contact with the historical, social, cultural and economical processes that shape and define Istanbul today. Moreover, they are physically detached from the image of Istanbul they harbour in their minds. What is the Istanbul of people, who live in gated communities and work in business plazas both being distant to the center, like? How many minutes is the relationship between the imaginary and the quotidian lives spent among home, workplace and the highway?
The longing for the representation of the image of “the city center” at the periphery is particularly remarkable. Restless reconstructions of the image of the center in the minds of the white collars at the periphery could possibly be read as an attempt in claiming the co-ownership of the center or, contrarily, as underestimating the power of the center. From a cynical view point, this is simply about mocking the center. In the latter case the center image is diluted one more time and the hyperreal condition raises to the surface: there is no more a distinction between the real and the simulated, which recursively define and produce each other.
The authors of these simulated reconstructions are the developers, architects and advertising agencies – parties who constitute only the tip of the iceberg. Those protagonists who compete for acceptance into the ranks of the social elite are the real villains and victims who simultaneously manufacture and consume the image of the centre. Reading marketing reports, the planners and developers analyze the demographic structure of the periphery only to offer short cut fixes dipped in center-themed sugar coatings to the public’s demand for functional settlement areas/housing projects. There is no harm in designing theme parks for that matter. In the media channels we hear that these gated communities are all environmentally conscious and sustainable projects muscled up with state of the art technological comforts and conveniences. However, what is really marketed here is a key to the “premium” life and the authentic city centre-experience. Never mind, if the promised image exists in reality or not. This sales pitch hits the bullseye cleverly, responding to the white-collar labourers search for identity and belonging.
Surely this condition is not unique to Istanbul. Since Levittown, the first planned community development in the US, the world has witnessed/experienced a multiplicity of scenarios in urban development. Today, ambitious developers team up with star architects to realize (larger than life) visions of grand projects at varying scales and degrees of glitter all around the world. There is an underlying strategy/mechanism to this phenomenon, which some call the Bilbao syndrome: top-down imposition of iconic buildings/architectural masterpieces to developing cities of the world. Supposedly, this puts the city on the global map while jump-starting the local economy. This prediction goes well with the generic win-win absurdity, accordingly, everybody wins: the population, local authorities, and of course investors, developers and architects. The sad side of the story is that hundreds of other cities far from being fertile grounds yet for global capitalism isolated in their geo-political remoteness are waiting for this magic wand of transformation to touch their fates.
Springing from “the generic city” concept of Rem Koolhaas, the Waterfront City project was proposed for Dubai in the near past, a Manhattan-like development that was claimed to be fit for the city. Such approaches generally base their arguments and publicity on cogent analysis, detailed contextualization plans and seemingly unwavering theoric jargons. Even so, the risk of reducing cities to theme parks regardless of whom they target -the elites or the masses- remains a great threat.
In emerging zones like Dubai where local resources are short in supply, we observe borrowing of concepts and vocabulary from the universal reserves of global urban culture for the development of new settlement zones. The difference in the case of Istanbul is that, it has chosen to appropriate and multiply it’s own image (even though it is not uncommon to see projects with global appeal such as the Kartal& Küçükçekmece urban transformation project by Zaha Hadid). Masses lacking skills to question their imposed life style are perfectly at peace with the workings of this appropriation mechanism. Masses in question here are content with the pillaging of the image of the centre as long as they get a cut of that image for themselves. It is understandable that these people choose to live in a miniature Istanbul under the auspices of some sort of “principality of periphery”. But are we bound from now on to an image of Istanbul that feeds primarily on such development projects of the periphery? If that is the case why do we still need the image of a city whose cultural references has been systematically diluted. Is it because we cannot imagine a better one or simply because there is no return from this point on?
Kaan Benli
Ali Cindoruk
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