“Mapping Istanbul,” published by the Garanti Gallery, is the result of the gallery’s long-running project “Becoming Istanbul.” “The project aims at understanding today’s İstanbul, contemporary debates and urban dynamics and their outcomes. It consists of an exhibition, a Web site that will be running in the near future [www.becomingistanbul.org] and publications,” one of the editors of the book, Pelin Derviş, explained during an interview with Today’s Zaman.“Becoming Istanbul,” which is formatted like a dictionary, has been published in Turkish, English and German and includes 152 entries from 100 writers about contemporary changes in Turkey’s cultural capital. The second sequence of the book, titled “Tracing Istanbul [from the air],” goes on to explore changes in the city through aerial photographs taken between 1992 and the present. The latest edition of “Mapping Istanbul” delves into the issues of the previous book with concrete data, Derviş adds.
The book features authentic maps on various subjects such as population, economic activities, education, earthquakes, health, consumption, energy resources and so on. The maps, which were previously exhibited at the German Architecture Museum (DAM) in 2008, are based on contemporary updated data and run parallel to articles written by various experts, including city planner and cartographer Murat Güvenç. The book includes 15 maps from Güvenç.
The editors of the book are targeting two kinds of readers: city researchers working on İstanbul and everyone with a sense of curiosity who wants to understand the city. Since the exhibition by Garanti Gallery has been invited to many countries throughout the world, the organizers of the project realized there was increasing attention toward İstanbul in the international arena. “The lack of publications that address this attention was the main reason we published this book in English. On the other hand, ‘Mapping Istanbul’ is a first in its own way. Such a publication has never been done so far. Various architecture, city planning and sociology departments in İstanbul were waiting for this book to be published to use in their classes,” Derviş explains.
The creator of the term “landscape urbanism,” Charles Waldheim, a professor and chair of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, wrote an introduction for the book. The professor, whose work examines the relationships between landscape and contemporary urbanism, describes the recent emergence of landscape as a medium of urban order for the contemporary city with the term “landscape urbanism.” In his introduction to the book, he explains the meaning of mapping and its intriguing history, offering his own views of the “Mapping Istanbul” project from a foreign perspective.
