Tearing Down Istanbul: excerpt from my feature for Next City

On a gray October Sunday in Istanbul, two policemen handcuff a young man along Tarlabasi Boulevard, bundle him into their minivan and speed off beneath billboards depicting an idyllic vision of the neighborhood’s future: smiling, well-dressed couples stroll hand-in-hand amidst chic shops and smart stone apartment buildings.

Beyond the signage, a few abandoned and crumbling brick tenements rise from a construction zone encircled by eight-foot metal fencing. Down a side street, three kids kick a ripped red soccer ball and two men toss planks of wood onto a small street-side fire. A trio of young men throws softball-sized rocks at an English-speaking passerby, urging him to, “Get away! Go!”

Just a stone’s throw from Taksim, Istanbul’s central square, Tarlabasi is undergoing what Turkish officials call urban transformation. The government is replacing nearly 300 aging 19th century buildings across nine city blocks with high-end offices, apartments, retail outlets and a hotel.

Formerly a Greek neighborhood, Tarlabasi has in recent decades become a sanctuary for the marginalized: mostly Kurds, with a smattering of Roma, transgendered and poor Turks from Anatolia. Now some 2,000 of them have been forced out – receiving as little as a third the market price of their homes – as drug-peddlers, prostitutes and thieves have moved in. About a half-dozen families whose homes have been targeted for expropriation remain.

“It’s like an open prison,” says Bahattin Argis, a 53-year-old Kurdish cook and father of four who has lived in Tarlabasi since 1998. After years of back and forth, an Istanbul court was expected to confirm Argis’ eviction in late November, awarding him 180,000 lira ($90,000) to leave.

“I feel as if the government, they told me they would take my wife, and I said, ‘No, they cannot.’” adds Argis, who is likely to return to Mardin, near Turkey’s border with Syria. “But they just took her. If I am forced to move back to my home, I feel like my honor will have been violated.”

Istanbul was a sleepy backwater of two million people as recently as 1970. But decades of economic growth and sprawl have transformed it into an unruly megalopolis of 15 million, a city now facing one of the most ambitious – and contested – makeovers of modern times. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an Istanbul native and former mayor of the city, has nearly $100 billion worth of construction projects on the drawing board.

These include a satellite city for over one million people, a multi-billion-dollar financial center, a six-runway airport expected to be the world’s largest, a third bridge across the Bosporus Strait and a 30-mile shipping canal linking the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea that the prime minister himself has called “crazy.” “If you really want to reach the level of contemporary civilizations,” Erdogan explained in April, “we must make such investments rapidly.”

Some 60 percent of the recent decisions made by Erdogan’s cabinet have been about construction projects, according to a government publication. Nationwide, construction has increased five-fold over the past decade. In 2002, Turkey issued building permits for 36 million square meters of space. In 2010, the number was 171 million.

The building frenzy prodded local journalist and political analyst Yigal Schleifer to argue, in a May story for the online publication Eurasianet, that Turkey had “turned into a ‘constructocracy,’ with a domestic economy driven by the construction sector and ruled by a government that seems to believe that every new big construction project only gives it more legitimacy and prestige.”

Construction represents just six to seven percent of Turkey’s GDP, but its real impact is much greater. Building sparks activity in real estate, cars and appliances, manufacturing, finance and other sectors – though too much tends to also result in congestion, corruption, imperiled resources and a roiling population.

“Construction is now the locomotive sector, especially in Istanbul,” Mustafa Sonmez, an economist and a columnist for two Turkish dailies, said during a recent interview at his office near Taksim. “The main aim is to brand the city and sell the land of Istanbul for a higher price, to Turks and to foreign investors, and the government is succeeding.”

CONCRETE ECONOMIES

The bulldozer as stimulus is largely a new concept. Historically, building has been a byproduct of economic growth, not its driver. There have been exceptions, like the so-called Japanese miracle and the early skyscraper eras in Chicago and New York. But for the most part, cities have generally added housing or new infrastructure to respond to urban growth, not to fuel it.

Urbanization across much of the developing world is upending that dynamic. “The phenomenon itself is not new, but it’s happening on a scale that is new,” says Blair Ruble, an urban resilience analyst at the Wilson Center, a Washington, DC-based think tank. “What is new is where it’s taking place, and how it’s taking place” – which is to say, in developing countries, and lightning-fast.

Find an emerging economy and you’ll likely find the makings of a constructocracy. Brazil recently launched a $400 billion infrastructure agenda, just as it nears completion on a similarly sized national housing scheme. Riding Indonesia’s six-percent annual growth, Jakarta is throwing up tall buildings – like the planned, 2,093-foot Signature Tower – as quickly as Doha or Dubai. From 2009 to 2020, the number of skyscrapers in the Indonesian capital is expected to increase more than six-fold, from 40 to 250.

In Lagos, the number of $100-a-night hotel rooms has tripled since 2004. Manila’s skyline has been transformed in recent years, with a 63-story luxury residence, the new headquarters of the Asian Development Bank and a Trump Tower still on the way. And as India’s urban areas welcome another 250 million people by 2030, tens of billions of dollars of new metro lines are on the agenda in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and other cities.

Then there’s the Concrete Dragon. From 2000 to 2010, China built roughly the equivalent of all the housing in Europe, excluding Turkey. This year the government launched a building boom previously unknown to man, in which some 250 million people will be urbanized by 2025 at a cost of as much as $600 billion a year. Rows of 20-story towers, along with roads, schools and hospitals, are appearing almost overnight on formerly dusty plains. “At current rates of construction,” writes the Economist Intelligence Unit, “China can build a city the size of Rome in only two weeks.”

The world’s urban population is growing by three million people every week, or nearly 300 people per minute, says Ruble. And the trend has just begun. As agrarian economies in Africa, Asia and South America shift to industry and services, waves of migrants will continue to seek opportunity in newly modernizing cities. Rates of urbanization and the ratios of rural to urban residents vary greatly, from the nearly 90 percent rural population of Brazil, to around 70 percent in Turkey and less than 40 percent in India. Yet every year for at least the next two decades, 100 million people will move from rural areas to cities, according to Ruble. They will need places to live and work, along with highways, bridges and metro systems to get from one to the other.

Cities generate roughly 80 percent of the world’s economic growth, according to several estimates. That number is sure to rise as urban populations expand, with the growth coming largely from construction. As leaders engage in a construction arms race, competing to attract talent and capital to what they hope emerges as the next great global city, the 21st century may come to be symbolized by the jackhammer and the crane. “The volume of urban construction for housing, office space, and transport services over the next 40 years,” predicts Global Trends 2030, a recent report by the US’s National Intelligence Council, “could roughly equal the entire volume of such construction to date in world history.”

To read the rest of this article, go to Next City.

Gezi Just the Beginning

While researching my soon-to-be-published story on Istanbul and the global building boom, I came across three nuggets of research that intersect in fascinating ways, underscoring where we are today and pointing toward an angry urban future.

The first bit has been in the news of late, and perhaps on the minds of Turkey watchers. Looking at historical data, Jeremy Wallace, a political science professor at Ohio State University, found that urban population growth tends to undermine authoritarian regimes. The greater the level of urban concentration in a given country, the shorter the shelf life of the autocrats.

It’s a logical finding, highlighting how cities concentrate large masses of people, connect them via roads and transport, and help them progress up the socio-economic hierarchy, moving beyond survival to concerns about services and quality of life. Wallace also found that these autocratic governments seem to understand this, and thus lavish a great deal more attention on their big cities than their rural areas – which, ironically, tends to draw more people to those cities. He also unearthed particularly good news for Gezi protesters and other critics of Erdogan’s government: regimes in which a single city, usually the capital, dominates the urban landscape fall nearly four years sooner.

The second nugget comes from urban data researchers Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt of the Santa Fe Institute, who found that the bigger the city, the more efficient it becomes. It's an idea that turns Malthus' theories about over-crowding and pestilence on their head, and its largely been borne out.

West and Bettencourt argue that a city is an organism, and, just as an elephant needs only 1,000 times the energy of a guinea pig despite being 10,000 times its size, a 5-million-person city needs less to accomplish factors more than its 200-hundred-thousand-person brethren. As a city grows, in essence, its inhabitants become better at solving its problems.

Finally, we have Brad Werner, a complex systems analyst at the University of California-San Diego. Of late he has begun to argue that, due to the apparent futility of global environmental management, mass resistance could well be humanity’s best means of slowing the unchecked growth threatening to destabilize life on earth. Many scientists are of the opinion that ditching our current economic system – focused on global capitalism and urban development – may soon become necessary to our survival. But only Werner has gone the next step and argued that protest may be our only chance of saving the planet from ourselves.

Considered together, the three discoveries -- from a political scientist-slash-historian, a pair of data researchers and a systems analyst -- outline a 21st century truth. As cities have gotten bigger, their inhabitants have hit upon protest as the best, most efficient method of dealing with heavy-handed governments failing to see which way the wind blows.

What does it all mean for Istanbul, Beijing, Moscow and other big cities? Hard to say for sure; could be dark days ahead.

In Turkey, Black Boxes Aim to Turn Neighbors into Spies

Istanbul has been abuzz this week with the harsh verdicts meted out in the five-year Ergenekon coup plot trial, with 17 of 275 defendants receiving life sentences for plotting to overthrow the government. It’s a stern warning to coup plotters, to be sure, much like another bit of recent, less-covered news.

Last week, police announced plans to install neighborhood informant boxes in cities across Turkey. Dubbed the Confidential Police Notice Point Project, the move will allow residents to submit anonymous written and oral tips on their neighbors. Picture a small black box on the corner where neighbors drop in slips of paper incriminating one another for offenses like banging pots and pans in support of the Gezi Park protesters (a nightly show of solidarity in many urban areas in the weeks following the countrywide protests).

“It’s a crime to disturb neighbors,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reportedly said in July, urging the public to turn in dissenters. “I’m telling you that such acts require punishment.”

The informant boxes follow a government decision to replace private security workers with state police at all state-run universities, the better to keep an eye on protest-prone college students. Meanwhile, anti-government protests that started back in May continued this past weekend.

On a sultry night, police chased a few hundred demonstrators from Gezi Park using teargas. Then, seemingly unaware of the irony, they drove armored trucks down Istiklal, or Independence, Avenue — Istanbul’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, filled with high-end shops and cafes — shooting rubber bullets at those brave or dumb enough to get in their way.

All this should be acutely troubling to anyone who cares about democracy in the urban world. Istanbulites long weary of the gaze of their government now must look into the eyes of their neighbors. Sure, in the 21st century, public assistance for crime-solving is a must. And most Western countries maintain anonymous hotlines and 411 numbers citizens can call with information on crimes and suspicious activity. But tools similar to the informant boxes have been used in dictator-run Arab countries, and as well as in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia — places where secret police kept watch and public trust evaporated.

In fact, local informants are not completely new to Turkey. “Historically, Istanbul police relied on local informants — the imam, the mukhtar (neighborhood or village leader) — at times of social unrest,” Fariba Zarinebaf, director of Middle East and Islamic studies at the University of California-Riverside and author of Crime and Punishment in Istanbul: 1700-1800, said via email, citing the late 19th century. “But I doubt these measures were ever that effective.”

In a modern world, with a government that has used force to silence demonstrators and cast them as looters, terrorists and rodents, this plan seems far more sinister.

What’s more, the rule of law has never been terribly strong in Turkey. With anonymous reporting, the potential for abuse is considerable. The government has in recent months made little secret of going after journalists it deems a threat to its reputation. What would stop the authorities from going after citizens that draw their ire, claiming an informant’s tip as their prod?

“It is interesting that dissent, i.e. banging on pots and pans, is being defined as a crime,” Zarinebaf said. “Citizens are asked to report this specific form of dissent, and you can imagine how much tension this would create among neighbors who may be mad at each other for various reasons, trying to settle scores.”

On the conservative Istanbul street where I live, near Galata Tower in Beyoglu, locals are out in the street all day. Older men chat, smoke and stare while headscarved women watch their children play and young boys huddle in groups to snack and laugh. They know everybody and trust each other. Crime is rare.

Security in the city relies on a patchwork of similarly organic neighborhood watches, based on familiarity. Take away that sense of familiarity and openness, and erode the system of public trust that has made Istanbul one of Europe’s safest cities.

“If the boxes work, it will tear away the unity of the mahalle (neighborhood) and will create extreme distrust,” Zarinebaf said. “But I am sure the citizens will defy the measure in most neighborhoods. The public has a clear understanding of what constitutes a ‘crime’ and when they should inform on criminal elements.”

The question is whether they may begin to expand those concepts at the urging of their government. In a recent television ad from the government security directorate, a young man is shown giving a rose to a young girl. Soon after, the girl is seen chanting slogans in a street protest. “They use the mask of ‘standing up for your rights’ in small demonstrations,” the narrator says, “ then they quietly steal your child from you.” The story closes with the girl becoming a suicide bomber.

The message is that any young person who stands up for his or her rights is a terrorist — and that everyone must be on guard against threats lurking in plain sight, like the young man with the rose.

There is, however, still hope for many parts of Istanbul where residents have already banded together in the wake of the Gezi protests. Urban Turks have launched more than 100 neighborhood forums all over the country. Most groups meet a few times per week and discuss the issues of the day, from the local to the national, and tend to share a strong sense of solidarity in opposition to the government of Erdoğan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

For these groups, the informant boxes will not be a welcome addition to the neighborhood and likely will go all but ignored.

But the same cannot be said of the large swaths of AKP supporters — like many residents of my neighborhood — that make up as much as half of Turkey’s 75 million people. For them, the çapulcu, the pot-banger, the terrorist and the coup plotter may soon be one and the same -- and the informant box may have its uses.


Originally published here, for Next City

Cobblestones and Urban Resilience

They dug up my street the other day to repair a water pipe. In cobblestoned Galata, such work requires the removal of dozens of sizable stones, which must be set aside for post-job replacement. But while the work is ongoing, the yawning hole is jarring -- the work-a-day life of the city has little respect for enchanting street scenes.

And yet it does. Istanbul's Nobel-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk noticed this, in the book he wrote about his beloved hometown: "When they dug up a street, the cobblestones had to be pulled up one by one and this made the work drag on for ever -- particularly if they found a Byzantine corridor underneath. When the repairs were done, I loved watching the workmen replacing the cobblestones one by one -- with a bewitching rhythmic skill."

I missed the bewitching rhythm of replacement, but the next day when I passed by the dug-up area I found the stones roughly back in place, though somewhat haphazardly -- too much space between stones here, one slightly askew there. A few days later, the morning after a hard rain, the stones had begun settling into place.

It's probably safe to assume that over the past half millennium or so each and every street in Galata has been similarly dug up. In a month or two, my street will look as if it hadn't been touched in centuries, the disturbance gone and forgotten, like the thousands that have come before.

The Madness of Sultan Tayyip

ISTANBUL -- May 29 is an historic date for Turkey, and particularly for this eternal city on the Bosphorus. On that day in 1453, Sultan Mehmed II, known to Turks as Fatih (the Conqueror), took Constantinople from the Byzantines, launching a Turkish reign that continues to this day.

Exactly five hundred sixty years later, a few miles north of where Mehmed II built a castle in preparation to take the city, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan turned up at a pomp-filled afternoon event along the Bosphorus to launch a grand and controversial infrastructure project – and his own political decline.

Growing up a dozen miles away in Kasimpasha, a conservative, working class district on the north bank of the Golden Horn, Erdogan earned a reputation as an indomitable brawler. This take-no-prisoners persona propelled his political rise, into office as mayor of Istanbul in 1994, and, nine years later, prime minister.

After a decade of strong economic growth, today's Turkey is brash and influential, much like its leader. Istanbul, the country’s cultural capital and economic engine, has developed into a tourist mecca and go-go metropolis of 15 million, where jackhammers, scaffolding and construction cranes are as familiar as the city’s Virginia Slim minarets.

But now the lord of the realm appears to be fighting an army of ghosts in addition to the usual suspects. That groundbreaking ceremony, for a third bridge across the Bosphorus, presented a trio of offenses that pushed public ire beyond the breaking point. The $3 billion project will require the razing of one of Istanbul's few remaining forests and is going ahead despite the opposition of environmentalists, urban planners and the Istanbul master plan.

During the event, officials announced that the bridge would be named after Yavuz Sultan Selim, a 16th century Ottoman ruler. Selim the Grim, as he's known, is remembered by Alevis -- a moderate Islamic minority of about 15 million people in Turkey, or 20 percent of the population -- as responsible for their mass slaughter. Selim is no hero to progressives either: in 1515 he made printing, a recent invention at the time, punishable by death.

Finally, after finishing up his remarks on the bridge, Erdogan directed a few words to a small band of demonstrators that had refused to give ground that morning to bulldozers attempting to uproot a handful of trees and begin construction on a replica barracks and mall project in Taksim, Istanbul's central square. “Do whatever you want,” said Erdogan, more paternalist than pugilist. “We have made our decision on Gezi park.”

“That really pissed people off,” said Imre Azem, the director of Ekumenopolis, a 2011 documentary about urban transformation of Istanbul. Azem was among the first handful of campers at Gezi Park the night bulldozers first arrived, Monday May 27. “So a lot more people came, and then there was the first dawn operation, at 5am Thursday, and after that it got huge."

We all know what came next: the government's harsh crackdown on Gezi demonstrators sparked mass protests in dozens of cities across the country, resulting in thousands injured and arrested and at least five people killed. The question now is whether all these events might lead to Erdogan’s demise. In a way, they already have.

Rather than cowing their leader, the mass protests have exposed his tin ear and stoked his inner despot. In a midnight session this past week, parliament passed a bill that castrates the country’s leading body of architects and planners (Chamber of Turkish Engineers and Architects), handing to a government ministry the chamber's ability to review major urban projects and issue permits and visas.

This is a direct affront to the Gezi protest movement, which was at root a fight against authoritarianism and government-controlled urban development. The new policy will essentially allow development by fiat, leading to more third bridges, more Gezi Parks, and more public protest. Instead of offering a solution, Erdogan has presented the protest leaders his middle finger.

What’s more, as a result of financial and monetary instability sparked by the protests, Ankara has launched investigations into financial market dealings with foreigners, and more recently into capital markets and its foreign exchange deals. These beg the question, why would a leader whose considerable reputation rests largely on a decade of economic dynamism (in addition to the shackling of the military) endanger the country’s credit rating and potentially scare off foreign investment? Why would Erdogan put Turkey’s great 21st century growth story at risk? His nature.

When cornered, a brawler tends to keep fighting. “Some people are saying I'm too rough," he said in June, referring to his response to the protests. "I'm sorry. This Tayyip Erdogan is not going to change." If he had been a bully before, post-Gezi Erdogan seems a modern-day Selim the Grim, with a dash of the madness of King George.

"Social media is the worst menace to society,” he said during a TV interview, despite the fact that his official Twitter account has more than 3 million followers. He blamed the protests on the international media, foreign extremists and an insidious "interest-rate lobby," among others, and said the same forces were behind the recent protests in Brazil. “The same game is being played in Brazil,” Erdogan told a rally of his supporters in Samsun. “They are controlled from the same center."

Unaware of the irony, Erdoğan urged Alevis, who have led the protests in many cities, not to be provoked by the efforts of the main opposition party. "Right now, the owners of the TV channels and newspapers that provoke the Gezi events, those who want to pour Alevis onto the streets, are all members of the [opposition] CHP,” he said.

The most troubling sign may have come this week, when he named Yigit Bulut, a TV personality who worries that world powers are trying to kill the prime minister via telekinesis, as a top economic adviser.

Leaders of Turkey have rarely wanted for foils or been big on checks and balances, but Erdogan’s decade in power appears to have warped his understanding of his position, and of democracy itself. A couple months ago he was at his peak, angling to rewrite the constitution, install a French-style presidential system and remain in office until the 100th anniversary of the republic in 2023. That scheme is now in tatters, and every move he makes seems dubious, from his protester conspiracy theories to his fumbled Syria policy and his government's confused, confusing response to the ouster of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt.

The government's response to the Gezi Park protests appears to have reduced public support for the the prime minister. A survey released in June found that Erdogan’s job approval ratings had fallen more than 10 percent since April, while support for the AKP had dipped one percent. Looking longer term, the very commercialization and urbanization Erdogan has ridden to economic glory has drawn millions of Turks to the cities, creating a more informed, urbane populace and perhaps starting to erode his largely rural, conservative base.

Still, there’s no reason to expect the AKP to fade from Turkish politics anytime soon. Millions of supporters still respond to the snap of Erdogan's fingers, but his stranglehold on national power has slipped. He's lost the political deftness that propelled his rise and, with elections looming next year, is barred by AKP rules from running again for prime minister.

The auspicious date of the third bridge groundbreaking was surely no accident. Erdogan has repeatedly linked himself to grand Ottoman-era rulers, such as with the opening of the Panorama 1453 Museum a few years ago. His visions -- the third bridge, the Marmaray rail tunnel under the Bosphorus, the world's largest airport, the $2.6 billion financial center, the Camlica Mosque -- might all be viewed as efforts to leave his mark on the former Constantinople.

But now that conquest has been slowed, along with Erdogan's political career. He'll still rank among the best leaders the republic has had, but his dream of becoming a modern-day Fatih or a second Ataturk will remain just that. The debate about whether he's lost his marbles will likely rage for some time, but for Sultan Tayyip, the end is nigh.