The murder of İstanbul

Both meetings concerned the future of a metropolis which suffers, to put it mildly, from growing pains. In 1945, the population was less than a million. By the end of the Cold War that figure rose to 6.5 million and since then İstanbul has easily doubled in size. It’s not just the number of people that increases. It’s also the number of cars. Every day, 500 new ones appear on the roads. If the city sometimes feels likes it’s going to pop, it is because there is a natural limit to its expansion. At a certain point İstanbul will run out of water to drink and fresh air to breathe. According to the head of the planning department for the city, the population should not exceed 16 million, which at the current rate of expansion does not give it that long to sort itself out, perhaps another decade.

Certain parts of the city grow quicker than others -- and these are the areas serviced by the bridges across the Bosporus. Sultanbeyli on the Asian side of the city has grown by 55 percent in the last decade alone to some 300,000 persons. It had a population of a mere 4,000 when construction of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge began in 1986. Anyone who thinks that bridges across the Bosporus will in themselves make it easier to get to work have their heads stuck in the sand. Bridges seed new settlements and create their own congestion. Of course, this is the very reason why it is such unbelievable folly for İstanbul to chop down 2.5 million trees to build a third Bosporus bridge. It will do what the first and second bridges did and simply pave over the forests.

So on the surface it should have been cause for celebration that the heads of the İstanbul professional chambers -- of architects, environmental engineers, electrical engineers, map and cadastral engineers, civil engineers, landscaping engineers, agricultural engineers, not to mention city planners -- should organize a press conference to announce their opposition to the bridge and their decision to open a court case to have the project cancelled. Apparently the hasty measures which the city council enacted to allow the project to go ahead entailed altering the 1:25000 scale plan in a way that entirely contradicts the 1:100,000 plan. This is a bit like enacting a law that makes it legal to steal, when the constitution specifically states stealing is wrong. Alas, the press conference seemed such a lackluster affair, so badly attended, and to be frank, so media-unsavvy in the way it was organized that it’s hard to see how the voice of reason will ever be heard.

However, the voices of unreason -- or at least self-interest -- were gathered in another meeting at a fancy İstanbul hotel. This was the unveiling of a plan, so mind boggling in its arrogant disregard for the well-being of İstanbul’s citizenry and so contemptuous of the city’s unique environment that one has to blink several times to realize that it took place at all. It was held to introduce a plan to build a new İstanbul of 3.5 million people on the Black Sea shore of the European side. It is the brain child of the prime minister, apparently, and has been meticulously planned by an American research team after spending not much more than a week “in country.” The knowledge of Turkey’s culture is evinced by the misspelling of “Kamal” Atatürk, whose legacy in a Kitsch-like display of false piety it invokes. Let me just state two points. The very existence of the plan puts paid to the fiction that the third bridge is only intended as a bypass for intercity traffic and will not develop the city’s remaining green area and water reserves. The second is that if this new town were to be built, from what the head of İstanbul’s planning department, İbrahim Bas, told me, the city’s authorities would under 2005 legislation have to go to jail for disregarding their obligation to enforce the current plan. So the plan suggests that all planning responsibilities be removed from their existing departments, in cities and ministries, and be transferred to a “super” ministry that would be responsible to the Prime Ministry alone. That office, to jog your memory, is headed by a man who as mayor of the city described the building of a third bridge as the “murder of İstanbul.”