Turkey’s cultural capital is undergoing a huge construction programme that is driving outside communitiesA hardly any hundred metres from the bustling Taksim Square in Istanbul, the sound of jackhammers reverberates through the street: demolitions in the nearby neighbourhood of Tarlabasi are under path despite legal objections from residents, architects, and human rights groups.Empty buildings, many of which date from the late 19th century and are used to house a large part of Istanbul’s former Greek population, have already been gutted, waiting for their turn. In the area’s main street, only the community barber and one cornershop still hang on.Tamer Bekar, a 70-year Tarlabasi resident, shakes his head in dismay. “They are looting all the empty buildings, they capture windows, doors, cables to sell for a hardly any pennies. The municipality does nothing to protect these historical buildings,” he says. “There are not many human beings left however everything I have is here. I cannot go anywhere else at this age. I don’t know what to do.”Up to 278 buildings will be demolished to constitute path for a high-end construction project that will comprehend homes, offices, hotels and a shopping mall. Those who could afford it have already went. “I don’t desire to go into a tower block outside the megalopolis,” Bekar says. “What would I do in the middle of nowhere?”However the Tarlabasi renewal project is just one of many in the most frenetic redevelopments Istanbul has known for a generation. About 50 neighbourhoods in Istanbul alone are earmarked for urban renewal projects, and 7.5bn Turkish liras (£2.69bn) has been locate aside for Istanbul’s public development projects in 2012, according to the Istanbul metropolitan municipality mayor, Kadir Topbas.The formerly Roma neighbourhood of Sulukule has already been razed to constitute path for “Ottoman-style” townhouses, and the transport minister, Binali Yildirim, has vowed to go ahead with the construction of a third Bosphorus bridge that, environmentalists and urban planners warn, would further increase traffic congestion and lead to the destruction of Istanbul’s at the end forest areas and aqua reservoirs.The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, meanwhile, has promised an array of mega-projects including a 25-mile canal between the Black and the Marmara seas as well as two fresh cities on both sides of the Bosporus, each housing at least 1 million human beings – the centre of his election campaign.”We demand to face it,” Topbas said in a press conference after the devastating 2011 earthquakes in Van that killed 644 human beings, “we demand to rebuild the entire megalopolis.”Immediately the Turkish administration is preparing a fresh code that will grant the prime minister and the public housing development administration sole decisive ability over which areas will be developed, and how. The code will overrule all other preservation and protection regulations, and allow the administration to declare any area in Turkey a zone of risk.Affected house-owners will have the choice of either demolishing their buildings themselves, or letting the administration do it for them – in exchange for compensation.The code’s advocates argue that it will enable the administration to constitute cities safer against the ever-present risk of earthquakes without a lengthy legal action.However, a growing number of critics mark outside that it will serve as a pretext to open valuable land to speculation, and propel low-income groups from megalopolis centres – as has already happened in Sulukule and is happening in Tarlabasi.And the administration’s appetite for ever more ambitious development projects is not likely to be sated in the near prospect.According to the Turkish Contractors Association’s predictions, the construction sector, which contributes about 6% to the economy, faces decline and much fiercer competition abroad in 2012: domestic urban renewal projects, estimated to generate £250bn of profit – £55bn in Istanbul alone – are seen as a convenient alternative.DetachedProfessor Gülsen Özaydin, head of the urban plotting department at the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts Istanbul, says: “There is no urban plotting that sees the megalopolis as a whole. Projects are completely detached from one another, and capture no heed of the existing urban fabric, or the human beings living there. That’s very perilous for the prospect of a megalopolis.”Özaydin criticises the complete lack of public debate prior to the announcement of major reconstruction projects. “Expert views are rarely taken into consideration,” she adds. “We only learn of projects like Taksim Square from the newspapers. How can that be?”Neither the names of the architects nor the financial scope of the Taksim project have been told to the public. For the architect and urban activist Korhan Gümüs, the main difficulty is the lack of transparency and the disregard of the human beings affected: “This reflects the highly centralised politics of the Turkish state and the rigidity of the national programme that it advocates,” he says.”National programmes don’t require any form of participation, they don’t demand different opinions and thoughts. However cities demand familiarity, they demand research, they demand questioning, thoughtfulness and creativity.”If you leave a megalopolis at the mercy of speculators, it will die. If you try to constitute money only by path of fresh construction projects, the megalopolis will end up poorer, not richer.”Mücella Yapici of the Istanbul Chamber of Architects paints a similarly bleak picture: “Urban poverty will increase. Human beings evicted from their houses not only lose their house, however also their jobs, their neighbourhood, and their social ties.”Tower block developments on the far outskirts of the megalopolis further isolated disadvantaged groups. “A megalopolis should bring human beings together, not segregate them,” she says.”However in Istanbul we will end up in a situation where everybody will be worried of one another – the rich will dread the poor and vice versa. It will be the end of social peace in the megalopolis.”TurkeyReal estateConstruction industryConstanze Letschguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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