If this sounds like guarded praise, then it reflects general disillusionment with a massive organization that consumed vast inputs of time and public money but which never really set fire to the city’s imagination. I recently wrote in praise of the “Legendary İstanbul” exhibition at the Sabanci Museum, which is an imaginative stroll through some of the great cultural artifacts of the İstanbul millennia. And it is true enough that IECC sponsorship contributed to a wonderful series of summer night concerts organized (or should that be improvised) around the quirky theme of Jazz in Ramadan. It was a privilege to sit in front of the second gate of Topkapi Palace and listen to Ahmad Jamal’s quartet. “Play more like Ahmad Jamal,” the young Miles Davis once told his musicians, and it was good advice.Yet I fear 2010 will be better remembered as the year İstanbul was nearly put on probation by UNESCO for having ignored its obligations as a World Heritage site, or as the year the government obliged the city against all judgment and environmental sense to build a third bridge across the Bosporus. And, even more destructively, a car tunnel from Asia to the historic peninsula. These are acts of provocative folly so lacking in any understanding of how local democracy should operate that those chaps who head the Ergenekon conspiracy must be kicking themselves in disappointment they didn’t think of it first.
However, İstanbul 2010 has finally sponsored a project (even if they slashed the budget half-way through) of which they and the city can be proud. It is one that will encourage today’s inhabitants to think about what the city once was and by extension where it is headed. It is an exhibition that will open at Santralİstanbul on Sept. 15 and is called İstanbul 1910-2010. It also carries the top heavy but self-explanatory subtitle: The City, Built Environment and Architectural Culture Exhibition. This might sound a bit dull, but believe me it is not.
What the exhibition does is make real and three dimensional the way the city has changed over the last hundred years. The premise is that İstanbul has gone through four distinct transformations since 1910: a period of war, defeat and dethronement as the capital of an empire (until the 1920s); a period of decline until after World War II, the dismantling of the multi-confessional city in the 1950s and a period of uncontrolled growth. Finally there is the post-1980 İstanbul which has assumed the mantel of a global city. This is no abstract thesis but a detailed mapping and visual reconstruction based in part on records never before used.
The İstanbul Chamber of Commerce has opened up its archive, which contains literally a million records of business which have been registered in İstanbul. The curators have also managed to digest electronically detailed commercial almanacs of who plied which trade and where. This has resulted, for example in the construction of a computer-generated architect’s model of the 1930 city which measures 70 meters square.
There are also overlapping topographical maps which show how the ethnic composition of neighborhoods change over time. There are photos as well of the not-so-distant past in which the familiar is turned upside down. Gezi Park in Taksim Square was once a military barracks with a rectangular courtyard that served as the city’s first football stadium. Public spaces appear and disappear. Lifestyles emerge and vanish. What are we to make of the posters from the “Society to encourage public civility” urging citizens to treat one another with respect and not to spit on the sidewalk.
The most ingenious display is left to last. The final exit corridor, 60 meters long, is lined with photos of the façades of buildings from Tünel in Beyoğlu through Taksim and Harbiye all the way to the skyscrapers of Maslak. We see the individual building with a full frontal detail one would never notice in the street. It takes a minute to traverse -- the same time it would take an aircraft to make the actual 12 kilometer journey. But of course it is a time lapse photographic journey of changing decades.
It seems it no more possible to stop change in a city like İstanbul than it is to stand in the way of a charging train. But if there is to be a fifth era to the city, it should be one in which its citizens are the master of that change. It should not be one in which the private motor car and the pursuit of profits run riot at the expense of people’s ability to live and breathe.
