Extramücadele
Memed Erdener graduated from Mimar Sinan University Fine Arts Faculty, Graphics Department, in Istanbul, in 1998. He worked at Young & Rubicam for ten years, beginning in 2000 as an art director and, from 2004 to 2010, as a creative director. He taught illustration at Mimar Sinan University Fine Arts Faculty, Graphics Department, from 2008 through 2010. In 2008, his short film Pompa was chosen for both the İf Istanbul and Cannes film festivals; his short film Slave was also shown at those film festivals. His drawings have been published in Unleashed: Contemporary Art From Turkey (TransGlobe, 2010), Vitamin D: New Perspectives In Drawing (Phaidon, 2005), and World Graphic Design (Merrell, 2004). Since 2010, he has worked as a graduate instructor at Bilgi University Communications Faculty, Department of Cultural Management.
I was just a kid; I must have been about six years old. I was walking down one of the busiest main streets in Istanbul with my mom and dad, looking in shop windows. Suddenly, I stop. My mom and dad do not notice, as they continue to walk and slowly move further away from me. Soon, I can barely make them out among the mass of people. To stand alone on the crowded main street and to watch the great movement around me is mesmerizing. People pace past me, cars try to struggle their way out of a traffic jam, ferries and tankers carrying oil traverse the Bosphorus, seagulls hang in the air above fishermen’s boats, flying in circles, letting out shrill cries. In the meantime, my mother and father, who love me, who protected me, and who have also stuck their nose in everything I have done so far, get smaller and smaller in the distance. It’s almost as if they are abandoning me. I continue to watch. It’s strange. I am making myself experience something new and disturbing. I want to indelibly record in my memory this magnificent moment of my childhood, and my feelings, so I never forget them. Here I am, alone in Istanbul. Where everything and everyone is constantly moving and changing, I stand firm, my child-self. At first, I get goose bumps, a sweet sense of fear takes over, but then, the fear subsides, and is replaced by some form of pleasure. I enjoy this feeling. A few more seconds go by. I run, fast! I pass by people I don’t know—how crowded it is! And then, yes, I see them. There they are. I hold onto my mother’s hand.
A view of Istanbul looking toward the Bosphorus.
© Memed Erdener
Forty-three people died in Turkey in one weekend
I no longer hold my mother’s hand. I’ve grown up. Yet, although I do not have my mother’s hand to hold anymore; I do check the skies as I walk along the pavement, in case an air-conditioning unit attached to the façade of a building falls on my head, and I never trust cars in traffic even if the lights are green for pedestrians. My behaviour is not due to fantasies I have conjured up, accidents occur quite frequently, and further examples can be given: On a weekend in July of this year, on the roads of Turkey, forty-three people died in car crashes. Let’s repeat, in one weekend, forty-three people died in traffic accidents. And if you consider that the greatest number of cars, public buses, minibuses, and trucks in the country exist in Istanbul traffic, you can perhaps imagine the aggressive chaos that prevails on the roads of the city.
According to a report in Zaman dated 23 July 2012, the state of driving schools in Turkey is deplorable. At these schools, where there is virtually no government oversight, it is apparently possible to receive a driver’s license without even having to take the practical driving test—at a small cost, of course. According to another report in the same newspaper, the number of traffic accidents has risen.1 Considering that 41,828 people have died since the beginning of clashes in 1984 in the civil war that has been continuing with the Kurdish guerrillas,2 it is clear that more people die on the roads of Turkey than in the civil war.
Typical traffic jam in Istanbul.
© Memed Erdener
Typical highway in Istanbul.
© Memed Erdener
Minibuses in Istanbul.
© Memed Erdener
Dolmuses are shared cabs.
© Memed Istanbul
People and cars
When, on 18 June 2012, three lanes of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge—one of the two suspension bridges, the other being the Bosphorus Bridge, that connect the two sides of Istanbul, or, more specifically, Asia and Europe—were closed due to repair work, the queues of stationary cars extending for kilometers created some interesting scenes. Drivers, suffocated by the traffic jam that didn’t budge for hours, got out of their cars to organize football matches on the broad, unused swathes of asphalt; skaters skated around and between the cars stuck in traffic; while some others simply gave up, parked, and took a nap. The municipality, in contrast, only thought of temporarily cancelling bridge tolls to allow the traffic to flow on the twentieth day of this chaos and set up portable toilets for people who spent a significant time in the traffic queues along the motorway.
The chaos that went on for days along the motorways that lead to the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, also known as the Second Bosphorus Bridge, served to strengthen the position of government officials who want to build a third bridge across the Bosphorus. The chaos was a setback for those who oppose the third bridge because they believe that a third bridge would worsen the traffic situation in the city, not improve it.
However, a refreshing piece of news is that the number of passenger cars per capita for Istanbul is quite low when compared to other European cities. The figure for European cities is around 350 to 400, whereas in Istanbul the figure was 137 for the year 2009. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, there were 1,775,335 passenger cars in Istanbul in December 2009.3 The projection for the year 2023 is 4,335,882 passenger cars, or 252 vehicles per capita. In other words, there is still a long way to go in terms of owning private cars. I hope that this piece of data does not further delay the public transportation infrastructure investment Istanbul needs.
In light of these figures, it is useful to look at the passenger volumes of vehicles in traffic: On average, private cars have 1.57 passengers; service minibuses have ten passengers; and public buses have thirty passengers. A comparison of private car and public transport ratios between Istanbul and the leading cities of the world shows that Istanbul and New York, for example, have similar figures. I can’t help but wish that the two cities were similar in terms of the income of their citizens as well.
The Bosphorus Bridge, also known as the First Bosphorus Bridge, is one of two suspension bridges that connect the European and Asian sides of Istanbul.
© Memed Erdener
Bosphorus Bridge traffic.
© Memed Erdener
Ferries at Uskudar Port in Istanbul.
© Memed Erdener
By 2023, 22 to 25 million people in the city
The population of Istanbul was 11.6 million in 2006. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute’s data from late 2009, the population has risen to 12.9 million. By the year 2023, projections suggest that the total population of the city of Istanbul will be between twenty-two and twenty-five million, if current dynamics and trends continue.4
As the economic and cultural production generators and, even the politics of Turkey, with its surface area of 780,000 square kilometres, become increasingly centered in Istanbul, it seems impossible to control its growth, and produce urban tumors in the process. The city expands continuously: It gets more crowded as it waits for the great earthquake that strikes once every one hundred years. It is almost as if the city is waiting for its executioner. The mood of the wait is such that some regard the presumed great destruction as some kind of salvation for the Istanbul of unplanned, illegal, and crooked development. This strange example reminds me of those masochistic football fans who, when their team is already down three to zero, exclaim, “I would just love it if we conceded the fourth, and the fifth.” I don’t know whether this is akin to a desire to be reborn from your own ashes, or an emulation of the sad and pessimistic refrain of an arabesk song.
A few square meters of green
Strange but true! Concrete-city Istanbul does have institutional norms for urban green areas like other leading cities of the world. The institutional norm for Turkey is ten square meters per person, whereas in Amsterdam the figure is forty-five-and-one-half square meters and in Stockholm eighty-five-and-one-half square meters. According to environmental experts, the active green area per person in Istanbul at the moment is three square meters.
Following the 1999 Gölcük earthquake, in which 17,480 people died and 23,781 were injured (its epicenter was 70 kilometers from Istanbul), the Istanbul municipal government took the precaution of designating a series of vacant areas where people could gather in the event of a probable Istanbul earthquake. One such gathering zone was an empty lot in Mecidiyeköy, one of the largest, most densely populated districts of Istanbul. Today, there are two skyscrapers on that lot; they are called the Trump Towers.
Istanbul's Taksim Square is a major mobility hub, tourist attraction, and historic site of both conflicts and celebrations.
© Memed Erdener
A slightly improved public transport network
Despite the recent opening of the Kadıköy-Kartal underground line on the Asian side of the city and the introduction of a metrobus service along the motorway connecting the two continents that today carries thousands of people, the public transport network is still insufficient and has not prevented regular, widespread traffic congestion across the city. The disorganized and often even illegal nature of residential construction, as well as infrastructural problems that are laid bare in the most striking manner every time the city receives heavy rainfall, are among Istanbul's other major problems that demand urgent attention.
Subway entrance in Istanbul.
© Memed Erdener
A crowded subway platform in Istanbul.
© Memed Erdener
People wait at a tram station in Istanbul.
© Memed Erdener
Armed men and the dead own nature
Following the rapid growth of Istanbul, many military zones that were originally on the outskirts of the city are now in the city center. The end of the Cold War, the transformation of Lenin’s USSR into Putin’s Russia, and the near impossibility of carrying out a new military coup d’état in present-day Turkey means that the barracks positioned within the city have lost their raison d’être. That’s good news. Another good thing is that all of these places are closed to investment and the insatiable construction industry of Istanbul; and almost all of these sites are located within green areas and forests.
A general overview reveals that the few remaining green areas within the city limits of Istanbul are either military properties or cemeteries. In poetic terms, the green areas of Istanbul belong either to armed men in uniforms or the dead. To bury the dead in the ground and to return them to nature and to find them a place in the shade of a tree in such a crowded city is perhaps not a great problem for this century. But what about the tanks hidden among the trees, the bombs and the rifles buried in the ground? For whom and what are they there?
The people of Istanbul have to reunite with nature and fresh air. The ruling power, thirsty for profit, has chosen to build skyscrapers in the very few unbuilt areas where the people were supposed to gather if the probable Istanbul earthquake struck, and they are fully aware of the profit capacity of the green areas that belong to the military. Housing Development Administration (TOKİ)5 and the municipalities are working quietly but determinedly to acquire these last green areas remaining in the city. Korhan Gümüş, an architect who forms city watch groups—local coalitions of citizens, municipal authorities, and experts—to guide urban planning in Turkish cities, engaging in a participatory process to ensure the safety and health of their communities, explains that, “Assigning new functions or preparing projects won’t be enough to recover military areas for the city. A mission-oriented, self-governing institutionalized approach which can mobilize diverse sources of energy is required. However, this is extremely difficult with the centralist bureaucratic administrative model in power at present. Thus, the only option it comes up with is privatization. Whereas the municipalities must learn to collaborate with institutions of specialization and to design processes and administrative structures open to participation.” 6
If we do not want to see huge buildings on the green areas where children should be playing, we have to act now. We have to break down the barriers erected in front of our imagination. We have to make a miracle in the city possible. We no longer want shopping centers. All power to the imagination!
- For statistical information related to fatal traffic accidents in Turkey, see: http://www.trafik.gov.tr/istatistikler/istatistikler_s.asp
- From Milliyet, dated 24 June 2010, accessed 24 August 2012: http://gundem.milliyet.com.tr/26-yilin-kanli-bilancosu/guncel/gundemdetay/24.06.2010/1254711/default.htm
- Turkish Statistical Institute: http://www.turkstat.gov.tr
- For a projection on Istanbul’s population in 2023 and 2050, accessed 24 August 2012: http://bianet.org/bianet/bianet/96034-istanbul-2023te-21-milyon-2050de-50-milyon
- Housing Development Administration: http://www.toki.gov.tr/
- For Korhan Gümüş’ comments on military areas in the city, see: http://www.taraf.com.tr/haber/haki-gitsin-yesil-kalsin.htm http://vimeo.com/44865995 http://www.arkitera.com/haber/index/detay/istanbulun-askeri-yesil-alanlarini-gelecekte-nasil-hayal-etmek-istersiniz_/9287)
