Planner on vacation solves critical urban issues in unsuspecting global city

In a bold, three-step maneuver over the past two weeks, an American urban planner on a fortnight’s vacation in Istanbul has developed a clear and concise mental map for solving the burgeoning global city’s nagging problems through a new urban politics. The city, which has doubled in size since his last visit in 1995, tempers its glorious scenery, deep and complex patrimony and vibrant artistic and intellectual scenes with brutal traffic, an inadequate public realm and a growth machine threatening to wreak havoc on its human, built and natural environments.

“It’s really quite simple,” said Arthur Schatzburg, between sips of Efes™ while sitting in a funky outdoor café in Cihangir after a particularly challenging five lira yoga class at a nearby studio. “First of all, the global city discourse is a canard in the case of Istanbul. You could argue that it was one of the first global cities, and has always been a major crossroads of capital flows. The question is not how to resist globalization, but how to make the current round of globalization work for the majority of Istanbullers, as opposed to just a few. This stance will infuriate the radical Turkish left, but they just need to study judo and adopt a progressive community benefits framework where they insist on getting something out of development, as opposed to nothing, which is what is currently happening.”

“Second, this shift towards a community benefits framework will enable planners to focus on making the city more livable, which is its largest problem. The flight of the upwardly mobile middle classes to gated communities on the periphery is akin to suburbanization in the United States a generation ago. The core is hard to live in – too much traffic, terrible pedestrian realms, little access to parks and nature, almost impossible to bike without being killed. Take the Barbaros/Buyukdere corridor, the main boulevard going from Besiktas in the historic center through the burgeoning corporate towers of the Levent and now Maslak. Buyukdere may mean big stream or big river in Turkish, but in Istanbul it means big pedestrian nightmare that tears through the city and leaves dense older neighborhoods isolated from one another. It is a grade-level Cross-Bronx Expressway. People may associate Moses with Hausmann, but they are very different. This is pure Moses in Istanbul. Buyukdere and Tarlabashi Blvd. are just urban highways designed for movement. At least Hausmann built sidewalks. The only chances for leisurely flannerie in Istanbul is on Istiqual Street, which explains why it is so packed and popular, or the new shopping malls. Even walking on the street in bourgeois Bebek means dodging cars in between bites of waffle. The city must begin to extract concessions from the developers to rebuild the public realm in and around these development corridors, ensuring that local residents’ ability to walk to transit, to shopping and to parks and plazas is increased.”

“Third, this emphasis on livability may be the key to providing any sort of political traction to the various forces looking for a new direction for development in Istanbul. Right now, developers are running the show, and transportation planners seem to be operating in a vacuum, building two systems that barely talk to each other and certainly don’t communicate with the street and the neighborhoods. But opposition is tricky – the neighborhoods under threat of eviction are very different from each other and are having a hard time coming together across class and ethnic divides. The opposition to the third bridge is broad but shallow, and it is facing a powerful machine being driven from both Ankara and Istanbul, not to mention Dubai and London. Livability is about the little things – the ability to get where you need to go in less than two hours, the ability not to be killed by a minibus, the ability to get some exercise if you can’t afford the gym. This does not substitute for basic civil rights in a democracy or basic human rights under capitalism, but it is one thing that we all have in common. Poor people’s movements in urban cities ignore the middle classes at their own peril, and this could be one discursive shift that can restructure the redevelopment machine. It may not stop the third bridge, but perhaps it can work to shift ‘regeneration’ policy from an emphasis on buildings to an emphasis on the public realm, accessibility and mobility.”

In response to challenges from more learned colleagues native to Istanbul who actually have PHD’s and have been working on Istanbul’s problems for years – challenges which ranged from the difficulty of doing any of this given the power of capital and a semi-autocratic and highly centralized state to Schatzburg’s stunning naïvete and classic western arrogance – Schatzburg took another sip of his beer and continued talking about sidewalks and how awesome the Metrobus would be if you could get there without feeling like you were going to die.

All Urban Problems now Problem Spaces

Dateline July 12, 2009. Paris. 12:45 CET

The International Association of Urban Intellectuals, meeting this week for their 112th global symposium at the Walter Benjamin Conference Center in Paris, announced that forthwith all problems associated with urbanization and metropolitan living would be converted to problem spaces. The change will go into effect on January 1st, leading some to speculate about the challenges faced by cities and their residents in anticipation of the conversion. Discursive shifts of this sort, while not unprecedented, often come with significant epistemological and pecuniary costs, including altering one’s outlook on daily urban living and buying lots of new books.

The rapid development of communications technology is expected to aid significantly in the conversion process. Microsoft announced a patch to PowerPoint™ which would enable architects, planners and engineers to rapidly alter old presentations to be rehashed in the new language. It includes an autocorrect function to prevent unwanted slippage into previous terminology. Similarly, Apple announce that at least three IPhone™ apps were under development by its army of independent programmers, including one app which reportedly includes daily maxims from poststructuralist thinkers in order to help stubborn positivists and bitter technocrats to effect the ontological shift needed for true adherence to the associations’ decision.

Nevertheless, the conversion is expected to cost upwards of €4.1 billion, a cost deemed negligible by Association spokesperson Robert van Dietrich. “The importance of clean and healthy discourse can not be underestimated in today’s rapidly urbanizing world,” said van Dietrich in a prepared statement. “After careful consideration by the association’s executive comitat, we recognized that the very survival of the human race depended on our ability to speak differently about the urban.”

The move is seen by some as the final push to move past the controversial Mike Davis era, when the world-renowned Planet of Slums author chaired the association through what many observers consider its most anti-urban phase since the long tenure of Louis Wirth in the 1930’s. Davis’ sensationalist account of slum dwelling masses in an amorphous global south sold millions of copies and catapulted hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens into the ranks of amateur urbanism, but similarly helped prop up a movement towards the aesthetisization of poverty, a tool often used by the global urban growth machine to redevelop poor communities and displace the poor from valuable land in the urban center.

Given both the fractious nature and significant power of this unelected body of professional scholars and itinerant organic intellectuals, internal and external criticism of the move has been swift. Prominent environmentalists dismissed the move as irrelevant, noting that the problem was urbanization itself, and that we should all read more Aldo Leopold. The Society of People Who Love Transportation released a terse statement indicating that the solution was not discourse, but bikes and BRT. In the most radical move yet, a dissident group of planning theorists interrupted the final deliberations at the Benjamin center by chaining themselves to the coffee makers in the lobby and chanting lines from Habermas. One of the dissident theorists, who was later arrested, had tattooed the groups’ rallying cry, “This is not our BATNA!” on his chest.

Despite these more radical protests, most debate about the edict, while passionate, was civilized and conducted with full knowledge of power relations and ample glasses of pastis. The problem space subcommittee, which will be in charge of licensing problem spaces in a post conversion era, remained deadlocked on the issue of whether the power of starchitects constituted a single problems space of its own or whether each individual architect constituted a separate space, determined by ego size and their ability to captivate developers and politicians with pornographic renderings of unbuildable and unnecessary megaprojects. On a similar note, the committee reserved the right to grandfather in some concerns as problems due to their seemingly intractable nature, including New Urbanism, academic conferences, and traffic.

In related urban news, members of the Lefebvrian liberation front declared the urban revolution to be complete, and Lefebvre to be the dominant paradigm. In a press release spray-painted on the Centre Pompidou, they urged us all to understand the urban as the newly dominant means of production while continuing to adhere to the classically Marxist emphasis on use value over exchange value. They also derided German efforts to scientifically produce a new generation of urban theorists in response to recent French hegemony. The French dominated the last World Urbanism Games held in Delhi, claiming medals in all events except land use modeling.

This piece is reprinted, with permission, from Volume 22 of the Berkeley Planning Journal, a fine, upstanding publication.