Speakers
Description
Public urban space in 21st-century urban environments has become a highly controversial topic. As neoliberal agendas dominate the production of urban space towards a more privatized, commercialized, and commodified mode of urbanization, truly public urban venues become rare relicts. With the rapid propagation of privately owned public spaces and pseudo public spaces in major urban centers, public life is shifting to monitored, controlled, and commercialized spaces such as shopping malls and mixed-use large-scale complexes, as well as cultural prestige projects that aim to revitalize historical city centers and industrial heritage zones, often leading to gentrification.
With over 100 shopping malls in and around the city and numerous mega-infrastructural and cultural prestige projects within the historical city center, Istanbul is not an exception to this tendency. In the last decades, the historical waterfront of the city from Karaköy to the Golden Horn has been acutely transformed as historical industrial heritage sites are refunctioned into large-scale, high-end prestige projects such as Galataport and Haliç Shipyard, creating a great deal of controversy around the commodification and privatization of public spaces. The Karaköy-Golden Horn coast line has been a historical transportation hub and a harbor, a zone of industrial production as well as a site for leisure and recreation since the Byzantine and Ottoman periods. Starting from the last quarter of the 20th century, the area has been subjected to a series of urban transformation attempts so as to create a cultural hub for the “globalized Istanbul”, in line with the Golden Horn Cultural Valley project of the Istanbul Greater Municipality. Since the end of the 20th century, a number of educational, cultural, and art venues have been implemented in the Golden Horn area, such as Santral Istanbul, Kadir Has University, Feshane Cultural Center, Rahmi Koç Industrial Museum, and Sütlüce Congress Center. Karaköy coastline is also undergoing a massive urban transformation with large-scale cultural prestige projects, art venues, galleries, and research centers.
In this urban context, the 3rd Architectural Project Studio of İstanbul Bilgi University Department of Architecture aims to address the issue of publicity in the hypercapitalist urban condition of the 21st century. Located at the junction point of Karaköy and Golden Horn, the project site is at the edge of Karaköy Square, an urban void that is currently used as a parking and drop-off area. Bound by the Galata Bridge and Karaköy Coastline on the East, Perşembe Pazarı on the North, Golden Horn coastline park on the West and the Golden Horn Sea line on the South, the site is densely loaded in terms of historical context, traffic and pedestrian flows, land use patterns, and functions. The area is a chaotic node on the interrupted continuity of the Karaköy-Golden Horn historical coastline, having two major urban interventions triggering privatization and gentrification; Galataport on the East and Haliç Shipyard on the West.
This paper aims to share the initiating theoretical background, the studio structure, the findings and outcomes of the studio, extending an invitation to rethink Istanbul historical waterfront as a truly public urban space, being a non-profit, non-commodified urban hub highly accessible to all. Rather than having a gentrification effect, this hub is meant to be attentive to the local dynamics, supporting and enhancing the existing networks of relations, economics, production systems, and modes of living.
| Keywords | İstanbul, Golden Horn; Neoliberal Urbanisation; Public Space; Architectural Education |
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| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
