Istanbul (Not Constantinople) —

Anxious modernity.

January 2023, sponsored and published by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA)

Istanbul. Constantinople. A city across two continents. One foot in Europe, one foot in Asia, separated by the Bosphorus. Successively Rome of the East, the capital of the Byzantine empire until 1453, the seat of Ottoman rule until the first World War and the collapse of the empire, and the beating heart of modern Turkey, a country whose national identity is as precarious as the city’s tiptoe around the two continents.  Istanbul is today a booming metropolis whose llatest development and rapid transformations have left many preoccupied with its shifting and uncertain identity despite a multi-ethnic and layered history. Indeed, in the process of opening the city to the global stage, its rich heritage has come under threat. It is this quest for identity, this anxiety towards urban ‘modernity’, that I was looking to grasp through my visit to Istanbul. I tried to understand both the planned or unplanned forces that transformed the fabric of these neighborhoods in the last century. In the field, I tried to comprehend how these forces were at play in the built environment, looking at housing typologies, state of preservation, public space and attractivity of neighborhoods.

The series of drawings and captions above (see From the sketchbook), beyond floating lines of ink and graphite, render the feeling of a disappearing city. Is it simply the projection of a foreign melancholic gaze? Or is it a fragment of a more complex reality? My fieldwork focused mainly on the Fener-Balat and Sulukule areas, located in the historical peninsula between the golden horn and the walls of Constantinople. The following piece, supported by personal observations and academic literature, argues for the disappearance of urban narratives and histories, in the historical fabric of the city, through state sponsored violence and policies. The studied neighborhoods were formerly inhabited by Armenian, Jewish and Greek minorities, which nationalist uprising and growing xenophobia throughout the first half of the 20th century, pushed out of the city and of the country at large. In the following decades, a population influx from the Anatolian countryside, coupled with the rise of real estate speculation in Istanbul, changed not only the residing population, but the very nature of the urban fabric. At the turn of the 21th century, urban renewal policies perpetuated a regime of exclusion through ’fake’ preservation and induced gentrification.

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Sources:

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