Urban Ethics Under Conditions of Crisis: Politics, Architecture, Landscape Sustainability and Multidisciplinary Engineering by Konstantinos Moraitis & Stamatina Th. Rassia

Author:Konstantinos Moraitis & Stamatina Th. Rassia [Moraitis, Konstantinos & Rassia, Stamatina Th.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789813141933
Goodreads: 30554946
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
Published: 2017-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

4.An Investigation on Istanbul: Looking for Spatial Diversity

During the modernist period, we were introduced to Le Corbusier’s ‘city of towers’ proposal, which brings enormous 60-storey constructions in the heart of an old city. An entirely new system of town planning, “sufficient to bring together at certain points the great density of our modern populations” (Le Corbusier, 1960, p. 55). His idea of changing the center of old Paris into a modern business center as a “vital constructional event which the American sky-scraper has proved to be” has been encouraged and replicated incompetently all over the world. This act may have been a milestone of the deformation process, as it was used as a tool for changing old cities in a new era. The effects of this period have been monitored throughout the 20th century and incorporated into ideological and economic policies for the purpose of redefining urban space. Each country has experienced its own modernist revaluation in urban space, each in line with its own culture and where it stands in modernity. These effects are still evident in developing countries where planning is being used as a tool of political governing instead of a participatory self-organizing system.

Since the beginning of the new millennium, it has been the deformation process of urban spaces in Turkey that has increased, rather than a transformation of urban characteristics that would lead to sustainable urban environments. Today we are witnessing the sudden disappearance of spatial diversities that had combined over a long period of time. Le Corbusier’s 60-storey constructions that proposed to change existing system of urban pattern have become a feature of Istanbul’s skyline. However, contrary to Le Corbusier’s suggestion, Istanbul’s towers that are located in the central urban area are not designed to offer a new life for the working class but to offer global investors the opportunity to watch the city from above, without getting dirty in the narrow streets of the city, giving them a chance to delight in their own public experience from security-gated plazas or rooftop gardens.

Hence, it is possible to say that the impact of new global economic dynamics became more influential and started to threaten the center of our cities where no strategic plan exists to accommodate these investments. Neighborhoods were at the frontline for receiving the direct effects and negative influences of this process of change. High-rise projects of investors that impose corporate identities are springing up rapidly in neighborhoods and dominating urban space. What the city of Istanbul experienced with regard to this global phenomenon was clearly defined at the 42nd Congress of the International Society of City and Regional Planners in 2006. The introductory report (Vaggione, 2006) of the Congress states that the architectural products which arise in the process of building the urban space are no longer associated with the spirit of the space at all. Each of the so-called prestigious buildings resembles the next, each one bearing the signature of a “superstar” architect, is changing city centers without any connection to the urban context.

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