Istanbul

Nora Fisher-Onar, Susan C. Pearce, E. Fuat Keyman

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813589114
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

Istanbul explores how to live with difference through the prism of an age-old, cutting-edge city whose people have long confronted the challenge of sharing space with the Other. Located at the intersection of trade networks connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, Istanbul is western and eastern, northern and southern, religious and secular. Heir of ancient empires, Istanbul is the premier city of a proud nation-state even as it has become a global city of multinational corporations, NGOs, and capital flows.  Rather than exploring Istanbul as one place at one time, the contributors to this volume focus on the city’s experience of migration and globalization over the last two centuries. Asking what Istanbul teaches us about living with people whose hopes jostle with one’s own, contributors explore the rise, collapse, and fragile rebirth of cosmopolitan conviviality in a once and future world city. The result is a cogent, interdisciplinary exchange about an urban space that is microcosmic of dilemmas of diversity across time and space.  
 

Part I

The Past of Istanbul’s Present

Chapter 1

Imperial, National, and Global Istanbul

Three Istanbul “Moments” from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries

Çağlar Keyder

Cosmopolitanism is not a project but an effect; it is the reality and the consequence of the coexistence of groups whose diversity is sufficiently great that their interaction entails mutual reshaping and redefinition. It implies a common commitment to public openness in a society, to make a society on whatever scale—a city, a country, the world—work through communication, debate, and interaction between projects. Cosmopolitanism is a stance against assimilation into homogeneity, but also an attempt to overcome the mutually isolated existence of multiple communities and cultures. It presupposes the communicability of desires and objectives, of competing meanings attached to components of the social. It implies the ability of individuals to switch codes, to employ diverse sociolects, and to recognize the different grammars that provide structure to different groupings. In this way, communication among a multiplicity of populations is possible.

One premise of any discussion of cosmopolitanism is that there are cosmopolitan individuals who are indispensable to its existence. Cosmopolitanism creates the consciousness necessary for the emergence of such individuals. Such individual dispositions do not arise out of personal preference or as an option exercised in favor of a cosmopolitan orientation. The choice is simply not available unless there is an environment in which the cosmopolitan is socially produced and politically accommodated. A cosmopolitan social imaginary may emerge only when the state can be persuaded to allow the institutions within which a cosmopolitan arena may flourish. These institutions include the norms guiding the economy and the cultural and political practices that shape the contours of the universe within which individuals interact. A cosmopolitan disposition may be nourished under these conditions, but whether it will be tolerated by the guardians of the “natural” normative boundaries of the society will be determined by multiple factors.

In this chapter I analyze the opportunities for cosmopolitan orientation in Istanbul’s history over the last century and the degree to which cosmopolitanism was able (or not) to become a reality in distinct periods characterizing the city’s evolution. These periods are familiar ones: the imperial city of the turn of the last century, the national city of the republic, and the global city of the last two decades.1 However, before describing Istanbul’s adaptation to and accommodation of—cosmopolitan and otherwise—the political, economic, and cultural environments in each of these periods, some general comments about the defining features of the city in each epoch are in order.

Periodization of Cosmopolitan Affinities

To talk about the degree of cosmopolitanism of a city is difficult, for the population of a city is always diverse and heterogeneous. In a great city, heterogeneity and the mixing of diverse populations is unavoidable. The question for cosmopolitanism is whether this mixture becomes organic through interaction. If diversity leads to the definition of boundaries in such a way as to equate difference with mutual exclusion, we will be talking about coexistence and tolerance (or, to use a more contemporary concept, multiculturalism) but not cosmopolitanism. Diversity will be contained and channeled, expressible only in predetermined ways. In this sense, the counterpart (and the opposite) of cosmopolitanism that is most familiar in historical experience is nationalism. Within the national society, difference is reluctantly tolerated, but certainly not celebrated. We know that cosmopolitanism and nationalism have been historically, and currently are, counterposed, irrespective of the political orientation of national regimes (both the Left and the Right, have, with equal vehemence, condemned cosmopolitan consciousness). The very premise of nation building has excluded considerations of cosmopolitan orientation from our analytical agenda.2

Empires, by way of contrast, have been identified as possessing a framework for the comfortable existence of cosmopolitan individuals and cosmopolitanism. Empires are made up of disparate communities typically brought together under conquest, not in line with a preexisting project of unity as in the case of the nation-state, but through expediency. Empires generally do not seek to develop homogenizing projects. They do not aim to make reality conform to some presumed imperative of ethnic coherence. They simply become a collection of communities through a series of contingencies unfolding in military conquest and interstate accommodation. Under the framework of empire, communities continue to exist relatively undisturbed, allowing heterogeneity to survive. Different communities, relatively intact, carry the potential for interaction, for mutual influence, and for transforming the imperial framework under which they have to exist. In other words, empires may accommodate a cosmopolitan orientation but also may govern by compartmentalizing communities into their respective lifeworlds. Mutual exclusion of religious communities has been prevalent historically, especially when imperial institutions adopt a confessional idiom.

In rare cases, especially during the final stage of empires before World War I, it has been possible to detect more of a commitment to the sharing of urban social space by diverse communities and hence grounds for a political orientation that was more rational and associative than nationalism. This commitment may be termed “civic,” something akin to a constitutional engagement that invites deliberation, exchange, and competition over projects and mutual transformation of the actors. There is much room in such an arena for cosmopolitans: those who are at home in various ethnolects and sociolects, who are adept at switching codes and at translation. Whether the promise of cosmopolitanism is actually realized (as it perhaps was in Vienna or London) is a different matter and requires concrete historical analysis of the location in question.3

The nineteenth-century expansion of the world economy in terms of flows of goods, capital, and especially people, imbued what have been termed “port cities” with clear-cut examples of cosmopolitan potential. From the Pacific and Latin America to the Mediterranean and Asia, port cities such as İzmir, Alexandria, Bombay, Hong Kong, and Buenos Aires became the face of the global extension of trade, investment, and migration. Given their loose relationship with the states to which they were attached, port cities were prone to develop forms of local governance that privileged their relationship with imperial centers in Europe. Given their orientation to trade and their heterogeneous business population, these cities also were inclined to be “liberal” in their governance. Because they were not circumscribed by any geographically bounded project, the potential for a cosmopolitan dialectic among their ethnically and socially diverse communities was greater even than in great seats of empire like Istanbul, which in fact was a seat of power and therefore subject to a much stricter administrative logic than port cities. Port city populations were oriented to a global modernity, made concrete in the extension of European modes of material and intellectual life. Their physical aspects matched this orientation, especially in their marketplaces, which showcased multiple worlds.4

Twentieth-century nationalism, especially the variety adopted by newly independent states, was the opposite of imperial orientation in its embrace of the parochial. In arguing for the particular virtues of the chosen ethnic or religious group, it upheld the desirability of a homogeneous population base. Attributes of race, religion, and language could be foregrounded alternately according to immediate needs, but the underlying assumption remained the same: to establish a strong state, alien elements should be expunged and the nation should be constituted as a community with as much apparent unity as possible. In Turkey, Egypt, India, and China (among many other new nation-states), the creation of such homogeneity required various forms of exclusion and socialization. These efforts at ethnic engineering sought to fit existing populations into procrustean blueprints and attempted to mold future generations according to design. Cosmopolitan consciousness was considered a threat, signifying an active challenge to the national project because it admitted to and cherished the existence of diverse allegiances. Cosmopolitanism was castigated for positing an overly sophisticated social architecture, with layers of belonging entailing divided commitments and loyalty. It thus was regarded with suspicion and was often equated with betrayal. Nationalism emerged as a project of carefully directed modernity negotiated among the educated elites within an exclusionary national space. This presented an alternative to the globalizing modernity of the nineteenth century.

Hostility to cosmopolitan dispositions in national projects can be seen concretely in the attitude of the new nations of the twentieth century toward their port cities. These cities had housed the feared cosmopolitan societies connected through material and cultural flows to the imperial world. By ousting diverse ethnic and religious groups, nation builders sought to secure the desired demographic composition of the new nation. Postcolonial or new nation-states, whether after World War I, as in the case of Turkey, or after World War II, as in Egypt or China, all waged war against the memory of colonial mentalities, including the cosmopolitan nature of their port cities: İzmir, Alexandria, or Shanghai. These cities were symbolically (and sometimes literally) cordoned off from the national entity and conquered by the true owners of the country: the natives whom nationalist regimes sought to turn into nationals. Such conquests culminated in plunder: foreign or “non-national” properties were nationalized, the very spaces reminiscent of cosmopolitan coexistence seized by locals. Old mansions were turned into government offices, parks and gardens were occupied for informal housing, and banks and trading houses were left to decay. The old, imperial, and interconnected world cities with large “non-national” populations were transformed into the megacities of the global South, receiving migration from the modernizing countryside with the promise of urban employment. The newcomers were the former peasantry, often ideologically glorified as the soul of the nation. Their essentialized appearance on the historical stage contributed to the formation of the often xenophobic and developmentalist regimes of the post–World War II period.

In this world of national construction, homogeneity of the population became the ideal, pursued through policies that were legitimated on the basis of building monolithic, nonfissured communities. States claimed to embody and represent the popular ideal and opted for the uncomplicated simplicity of excluding the messy realities of the cosmopolitan. Such conceits, however, increasingly after the 1980s, came under the pressure of real-world developments. The insularity of the national was breached by economic, cultural, and technological developments, forcing political authorities reluctantly to adjust their focus as the world began to change under globalization.

Globalization, however defined, signified an end to attempts at isolated capitalist development by “third world” countries. Modernization projects directed from above were surrendered to the vagaries of global flows of capital, commodities, and culture. In this context the national megalopolises of the previous era began to give in to sweeping new connections, new economies, new social groups, and new divisions in the society. Those cities that succeeded in attracting larger shares of the global flow of capital, migration, and cultural flows did so by developing spaces that accommodated residents who considered themselves to be global citizens, based on criteria of occupation, lifestyle, and cultural orientation. Once again, those great cities had to accommodate diversity and difference within the urban space. As global cities became places for a more footloose population, ranging from short-term tourists to longer-term expatriates, migrant workers, and refugees, the earlier ideal of homogeneity had to be reconsidered, compelling municipal administrations and national residents and governments alike to accept the rights of others to the city. The exclusionary nationalist sentiments of the interwar and post–World War II period began to change in the 1980s, albeit slowly.5

It is not the case, of course, that in global cities nationalist exclusion will smoothly give way to cosmopolitan interaction among diverse communities and lead to civic engagement and shared commitment to the polis. In fact, globalization is often accompanied by social segregation with class divisions, creating a supranational consciousness in the top strata of transnational globalizers, while inciting localist reactions in those who remain outside of the new order.6 Despite (or because of) this dividedness of global cities, urban entrepreneurs urge citizens to buy into notions of city-belonging and urban citizenship. They do so to boost the city’s global competitive advantage, ignoring any potential divergence of interests. These pitches are reinforced by advertising copy issuing from urban growth coalitions of global cities as well as governments.7 Such exhortations and the overall rhetoric surrounding world cities entails a much more delibera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• foreword Istanbul: A Space of Untranslatability, a City Always Arising from Its Ashes Like a Phoenix
• Historical Timeline
• introduction Between Neo-Ottomanism and Neoliberalism: The Politics of Imagining Istanbul
• Part I. The Past of Istanbul’s Present
• Part II. Paradise Lost: Contested Memories of Cosmopolis
• Part III. Actually Existing Conviviality: Sharing Space in a Globalizing City
• Acknowledgments
• Recommended Further Reading
• Web Resources
• Notes on Contributors
• Index