[AN AMERICAN IN AVCILAR] Utopia in İstanbul?

We will see open areas, fields and forests, farms and wooded hillsides disappearing under asphalt and concrete. More and more of the city's area will be covered with roads and parking lots. The density of housing will decrease as more housing moves farther away from the city center. Suburbanization, the creation of new, smaller city centers dependent on the inner city and an increase in gated communities and clusters of tower housing blocks will come to characterize life in İstanbul.

I compared the effect of private automobiles in İstanbul to two American cities to illustrate how our dependency on cars also means that private cars shape and determine the lives we live. A further comparison may be helpful.

The vision of an İstanbul increasingly suburbanized and dominated by the automobile brings to mind a megalopolis in the US that stretches a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers south to north from Petersburg, Virginia, to Manchester, New Hampshire, and more than 500 kilometers east to west. One can drive at 100 kilometers per hour for 12 hours and never be out of sight of a McDonald's or KFC. One passes one Olive Garden after another but never sees an olive tree. And a car is not a luxury but a necessity. The car rules life rather than serving it.

Magali, my Brazilian-American friend, when she read last week's description of traffic in İstanbul, said, “Are you sure you are not writing about Sao Paulo?” Her comment reminds us that what we see in İstanbul and the choices about the quality of life in the former imperial city also describe the situation in cities all over the world experiencing explosive population growth. Already, the market for automobiles in China is greater than that in the US, the nation which first made the transition to an automotive society, and the number of cars in India and other economically developing nations is growing at an astounding speed. İstanbul is far from being alone in deciding whether it wants to give itself to the cult of the private car.

The deleterious impacts of the automobile culture

Many people, layman and expert alike, have identified several deleterious impacts of the automobile culture. In addition to traffic congestion, hours wasted sitting in stalled cars and exhaust-based pollution, they also note the demands private automobiles make in non-renewable resources and the flow of money away from auto-dependent countries to petroleum producing nations.

The high number of automobile-related deaths and injuries is almost taken for granted, even though the numbers should startle us. For example, in the US there were more traffic-related deaths each of the years since 2003 than the number of deaths in Iraq during the US-led invasion. In 2010, 32,708 people died in traffic accidents in America, and in Turkey more than 4,000 people per year die in traffic accidents. I do not know how we can be comfortable with these numbers, but when I look at drivers careening down the roads and intersections in Avcılar, too many drivers seem mindless of the dangers and implications of their actions.

However, I want to focus on another effect of the increased reliance on private transportation on the tension between public good versus private convenience. The automobile is both the symbol for and a large contributor to a dramatic change in the structures and habits of the society we live in. Describing and understanding this change has been a major preoccupation among sociologists since the founding of our discipline.

Ferdinand Tönnies, an early German sociologist, characterized the change as a move from Gemeinschaft society to Gesellschaft society, from a society where people are connected and governed by bonds of togetherness and mutual dependence to a society where individuals pursue personal goals and where the means are less important than the ends, and whatever it takes to get to ones goals are permissible. Max Weber, my favorite sociologist, saw the change as moving from communal norms and goals to societal, impersonal goals of consumption and one-upmanship. Weber saw affective relationships, where others' feelings are taken into consideration and where the common good governs interactions, being replaced by what he termed rational goals, where one acts based on cold calculations of the most expedient and efficient ways to reach what one wants. David Riesman, a later American sociologist who was particularly interested in life in the suburbs, noted a change from what he called inner-directedness to other-directedness -- rather than making decisions based on one's own values and decisions, Riesman saw suburban life as a largely anonymous “lonely” crowd where persons “do what everyone else is doing.” However, this conformity is not based on fellow-feeling but rather on an anxiety of trusting ones integrity and autonomy.

What these sociologists share is a conviction that in modern life a shallow individualism replaces a concern for the commonweal. Robert D. Putnam, a contemporary American sociologist, captures this feature of modern life in a book, “Bowling Alone,” which points to the decline of collective activities which once tied people to the larger social group and where concern for what is good for all is replaced by solitary pursuits.

Private cars and individualism

So, what does this have to do with private automobiles, the increasing congestion in İstanbul and the call for more roads, expressways, tunnels and bridges? The private car is a major cause of this rise in individualism and the waning of collective responsibility.

The private car promises freedom, freedom to make one's own decisions, freedom from supervision, freedom from the constraints of others' needs or convenience, freedom from external schedules and timetables, freedom to pursue one's own itinerary and destinations. The metaphor of the open road as license for a disconnected life is frequently expressed through movies and novels, such as “Easy Rider,” “Thelma and Louise,” “On the Road” and “Blue Highways.” Who needs a bowling league when one has a Chevy or a Mercedes?

Two further American examples may again be helpful. The suburb -- and its extreme manifestation the “gated community,” which is in no way a community -- is only possible with private automobiles. To bring that example home to İstanbul, living somewhere like Büyükçekmece's Alkent 2000, with its solitary houses strewn down the hillside towards Lake Büyükçekmece, is only possible with a private car. Conspicuous consumption is coupled with social isolation and the nuclear family -- and this is advertised as a statement that one has arrived. Living alone replaces social capital with economic capital.

A second American example is that peculiar institution of dating and its attendant sexualization of the teenager and intimacy. The car provides the means to elude supervision and separates teenage sociality from the family or other constraining influences. Although this further example is now obsolete, think of the way the drive-in movie, which was only possible with a car, fostered the dating pair being left to their own decisions and devices. Although drive-ins are gone, the car continues to weaken familial ties and mutual dependence and visibility.

That the car features in the increased sexualization of the individual and relationships may not be obvious at first, it is clear that automobile marketers have latched onto the connection. Why else drape voluptuous women across the hoods of the cars advertised in magazines, billboards and TV commercials?

Is the increasing number of automobiles in İstanbul connected to a shift in İstanbul culture from one marked by communal, mutually dependent, affective, inner-directed relations to one that is more individualistic, instrumental, solitary, autonomous and materialistic? Is the car supporting a replacement of commonweal values by atomistic ones, from the public good to private consumption? Let me offer a couple of examples that suggest the answer is “yes.”

Preempting shared social space

Sidewalks exemplify communal values -- they exist for everyone and they tie local communities together. As I walk home from the bus stop to my apartment building, I find myself again and again having to step off the sidewalk into the street because someone has parked her or his car on the sidewalk. The car gives the driver the right to preempt the shared social space of the sidewalk for selfish convenience. Autonomy trumps communal values. I find this same dynamic of the privileging of individual convenience over the social good in pedestrian crosswalks in streets. Even though the crosswalk, identified by the white stripes painted on the street, are intended to give precedence to pedestrians, walkers are imperiled every time they try to cross the street -- they must dodge insistent drivers who zoom into the walkers, giving their haste precedence over the safety of the walker.

Anyone in İstanbul who spends time outside their car can provide a myriad of other examples. Last week I tried to call attention to a choice we are facing in İstanbul about the future of our city. On the one hand, we can choose a future that increasingly depends on private transportation, with its urban sprawl, environmental degradation, highway deaths and injuries, endless commute times and hours spent stalled in congestion, as well as a further fracturing of social connections and the concern for shared values and an increase in autonomous private consumption (for those who can afford a car). On the other hand, we can choose to see the private car not as a solution but as a problem and invest our resources in making İstanbul a more livable city, one that continues to prize the common good over individualistic autonomy. Limit cars, make them less convenient, tax them heavily both to reduce demand and to produce revenue for public transportation, close more streets rather than build new ones, ban on-street (and on sidewalk) parking, and increase public transportation with more subways, trams, buses and taxis, and expand the Metrobus and similar options.

I fear the decision has already been made. As I ride the bus from Avcılar to my school in Hadimkoy, I pass several new automobile dealerships strewn alongside the E-5. Otopia, Autopia (one notes the utopia they imagine), and two smaller but still substantial new dealerships are currently under construction -- one promises to be the largest dealership in Europe. Maybe we are already doomed.