In Turgut Özal’s time, land profits were distributed to millions and it was licit and inclusive. Not anymore.

The Taksim Square has professedly become a pedestrian zone. It sounds like a good thing for pedestrians. “We have spared this zone exclusively for you. It is a car-free zone where you can enjoy the city and your lives.” This is how it sounds; but in practice it means quite the opposite. Do you wonder why?

I should have realized this earlier, when Istanbul Mayor Kadir Topbaş repeatedly said, “Don’t let the current view deceive you. We will reforest the area; adorn and polish it and all.” I haven’t. I also have ignored the discussions, it appears. The professed pedestrianization of Taksim has been in my head since the first day and I want to get it out of my system now: Now I realize how ugly Istanbul has become! The professed pedestrianization of Taksim has laid bare how we have spoiled Istanbul over the last 60 years. It seems that we have not noticed this in the chaos of the cars and vehicles surrounding us. I now see that all those roads, cars, and trees were in fact cosmetics to conceal the ugliness of the city. Since the square is now a plain concrete area without any cosmetics, its true colors can been seen. Taksim Square is not different from any city square in Anatolia. That thousand-year history we have been talking about was just a sweet story. All there is surrounding the square is a series of ordinary buildings. Nothing else. This is the first impression I got after I saw the reorganization of the Taksim Square.

What is the reason? Internal migration, probably. Until very recently, internal migration was the biggest social inclusion mechanism in Turkey. When I was born, in the early 1960s, 30 percent of Turkey’s population lived in urban areas. Currently this figure is over 75 percent. The newcomers got their share of the urban land and land profits. This mechanism used to be inclusive: urban land was distributed almost equally to hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – of rural to urban immigrants. Everyone got what was in their destiny. That was why we believed that Istanbul’s streets were paved with gold. Today, however, the distribution is exclusive. Today, profit is created by changing the floor area ratio on a given parcel of land. In the past, urban profits were distributed among poor millions. Today, however, profits obtained by changing floor ratios are shared by a few people who also happen to have the ability to obtain bank loans and build a sky scraper on that land. Some time ago I asked how land rent could be licit when interest rent was illicit. In Turgut Özal’s time, land profits were distributed to millions and it was licit and inclusive. Not anymore.

So, is it Anatolia’s fault that the Taksim Square looks like an ordinary town square in Anatolia? No. For the former, Istanbul has always been the point of reference. Civilization for Anatolia was to have what Istanbul has. About three decades ago in the southern town of  Alanya, someone said to me that, “Alanya has developed and modernized so much lately. It has gigantic apartment blocks, just like Istanbul.” I have never forgotten this anecdote. If Istanbul is considered the zenith of civilization, we are damned. What I mean to say is that Istanbul did not start resembling Anatolian towns because of domestic migration. The causality works the other way around: conservatives lacking any traditional anchor turned Istanbul into what it is today and treated history as a compilation of pots and pans, and Anatolia has imitated it. And this process is ongoing.

Why did I call the Taksim Square project a professed pedestrianization project? Because I believe that the project was designed for the sake of accelerating the flow of vehicle traffic. They were concerned solely with speeding up the traffic flow beneath the Square and no one thought about the flow of pedestrians towards Taksim. The pedestrian zone of Taksim is barely connected to the surrounding places. It appears that the automobile lobby has once again defeated the pedestrians. All the time was spent on planning the road map beneath Taksim. No consideration was given to designing the pedestrian zone. Sidewalks were narrowed further despite the need for the opposite. The project has blocked the veins that feed the square while suggesting that it has expanded it.

Will the project do any good? Will it ease down the traffic flow? Not really. Opening new roads is not a remedy to traffic congestion; it only relocates the congestion. What Turkey needs is a new understanding of urban management and child-friendly cities. I will talk about this further before the municipal elections.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 17.12.2013