In Ankara, there are 52 clock towers, each one uglier than the next, spattered along the roadsides.

There are two types of cities: those which are oriented toward commuting with private cars and those which are not. In the former, you can only drive; in the latter, you can walk, take the bus, subway, or cycle. In such cities, children can play and wander in the streets. Children living in cities of the first type are not happy. If children are unhappy, the city is unhappy. It’s in our nature: birds are born to fly, and human beings are born to walk and run. Birds are happy as long as they can fly; and humans are happy as long as they can walk.

In Turkey, we tend to believe that cities where you can drive are tokens of development, which is completely incorrect. Once, we believed that large apartment blocks were signs of development, which was also incorrect. What Turkey needs is happy cities, not to repeat the old mistakes of the US. So, what is a happy city? Today, let me present a portrait of an unhappy city through Ankara’s example and then answer the question in the title. If you are wondering what the purpose of the Ankara Department of Urban Aesthetics is, please read on.

Ankara increasingly has become a city where you can only drive. A series of decisions were launched to enable faster travel within the city. New roads were constructed. If you ask me, Ankara has made a series of bad decisions lately. I don’t think the municipality did this to upset the townspeople. It was rather because the municipality does not have a vision; because it considers fast roads signs of development. The truth is, in the twenty-first century, the signs of civilization for Turkish cities are not roads, but sidewalks. Cities must be designed for the happiness of their residents. There is no end to constructing urban roads for faster automobile traffic. And the satisfaction residents derive from fast roads is short-lived. We need to get rid of this paradigm outright. A municipality that relies on faster urban roads makes children unhappy. For children, a city surrounded by 80km/hour urban roads is the same as one surrounded by walls. For them, the fast urban roads are the same thing as the walls Israel puts up in Israel.

And now for the Ankara Department of Urban Aesthetics deal. The duty of the department is to improve the city’s appearance. For that purpose, it puts frets and borders in median lanes. Since the municipality is concerned solely with fast urban roads, the aesthetics department is concerned with ornamenting the road medians. When the ornamenting is done, the department keeps itself busy with lighting and changing the facades of the buildings by the side of the road. Ankara’s latest trend, clock towers, are generally put up in road medians, too. There are 52 of them, as you know.

Conventionally, a city has a single clock tower in its central square, as in Izmir, London, or Prague. The one in Turkey’s Siirt is in a small park. In Ankara, there are 52 of them, each one uglier than the next, spattered along the roadsides. What few green areas remain in Ankara are the central reserves of roads. We usually don’t see them as we are busy watching the road while driving. But it is for sure that our children can enjoy  nature from the backseat. With the traffic congestion in Ankara, in spite of all the “plot-based-planning” efforts of Melih Bey, we can enjoy the view of the clock towers now.

Do you wonder why?  Because the organization of the entire city is oriented toward automobile transport to secure the comfort of car owners. Ankara is a road-oriented city. A city can be either human-friendly or car-friendly; not both. Ankara is an unhappy city.

Turkey has to change the definition of urbanization and the urban aesthetics approach already.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 28.03.2014