by
Yaşar Adnan Adanalı
Today
İstanbul ranks seventh among world cities in the number of
foreign visitors and international meetings it hosts and fifth in the
number of dollar millionaires living within its premises.
[2] It
is possible to list many other striking statistics about İstanbul. What
these numbers indicate is that İstanbul is moving at a fast pace
towards becoming a global city and it finds its place in the world city
map as a global magnet of capital and people. “Global city” is a project
made possible via the reproduction of the city in the framework of
processes of capitalist accumulation and mechanisms of neoliberal
production and consumption. This project consists of spatial, economic
and social processes as well as those that are by content and
application political.
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| Istiklal Street, Istanbul, Turkey, photo by Augapfel |
Although İstanbul’s current transformation has been presented as a
non-Western miracle of development in the face of the destructive
effects of economic crises, it is actually possible to think of this
transformation as a “skillful” application of well-known
global(urban)ization strategies by an alliance formed between the state,
the capital and local governments: (a) The segmentation of the city
into detached islands through the construction of profitmaking fragments
of the global urbanization catalogue, such as shopping malls, gated
communities, mass housing settlements (
TOKİ: Republic of Turkey Prime Ministry Housing Development Administration of Turkey), residences,
plazas, airports, techno parks, golf courts, cruise harbors; (b)
rendering lower and middle classes “powerless” in the face of this
transformation by means of forced evictions and legal pressure in order
to secure the land necessary for the construction of these urban
fragments; such that social and class-based segregation is conducted
alongside spatial segregation; (c) the production of urban corridors and
transportation infrastructures that will facilitate the flow of
capital, goods and humans between these fragments of the urban
catalogue. Consequently, while prioritizing the city of fluxes composed
of corridors to the city of integrated urban spaces, İstanbul’s
global(urban)ization project constructs wealthy spaces on the sites of
poor spaces. Lower class neighborhoods inhabited by the city’s poorest,
which at time same time carry the highest potential in terms of the
rising value of urban land, are refashioned by local
municipality-private sector partnerships and allotted to new
İstanbulites with highest cultural and economic capital (such as local
and foreign executives working in sectors that are in great demand in
the post-industrialist era like finance, design and informatics, as well
as professionals of the institutionalized field of arts and culture).
The aforementioned strategies can be explained with reference to
gentrification processes inherent to neoliberal urban transformation.
While these processes construct new wealthy spaces and forge new
socio-spatial relationships, they are abstracted from the concrete space
where the transformation is taking place; they are (de-spatialised).
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| Istiklal Street, Istanbul, Turkey, photo by Mrmya |
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| Istiklal Street, Istanbul, Turkey, photo by Mrmya |
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| Istiklal Street, Istanbul, Turkey, photo by bluedvls11 |
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| Istiklal Street, Istanbul, Turkey, photo by emredjan |
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