TOPOGRAPHIES Istanbul | Slum Clearance & Urban Re-Development
This project began as an inquiry as to how planning practice is being altered in the age of big data; and how that data is effecting the metanarratives that we internalize about the urban condition. I sought to explore this through the lens of slum conditions, clearances, and the co-occuring data utilized to justify the raising and erasure of these areas in the name of progress and development. In the course of research and contemplation, I turned again and again to the concept of legibility, as defined and explored by James Scott, as the the cornerstone of my understanding of slum clearance. Although tangentially related to big data, legibility relies more upon the actions taken by states in an attempt to create metrics by which they can, in essence, read communities. Scott’s argument is that these simplification measures taken by the state, usurp the power of nuance and ambiguity among groups of people in which traditional means of power are illusive. Scott, in his seminal work Seeing Like a State, describes the process over time as such: “How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment? Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored...” *
Through a comparative analysis of urban clearances at mid-century in the United States and the current urban redevelopment of Istanbul, I’ve sought to gain some understanding as to what methods have been utilized by authorities in order to claim that slum clearance and reconstruction are ultimately to the benefit of its residents. Through this portfolio I’ll explain some of the policies and themes that have resonated in the process of researching this topic. Although this process has brought together quite different elements, from post-war policy to Baudrillard’s Simulcrum in this final project I hope to tie together some of these disparate elements to present a cohesion picture (both written and visual) of my thoughts on the subject. This presentation is not intended to function as a typical academic paper, per se. Rather, I hope to also explore what the effects of the revealing (and the subsequent concealing) of research in less academic forms implies as a final product. In respect to my given “track” in this class as a creative practitioner, not being able to write academic papers on relevant subjects will be a recurring reality for me. In tying together this presentation, I hope to gain a working knowledge of how to distill history and theory to fit within the context of the creative professional envi-
*Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Image | Panoptes: in Greek Mythology, a giant with a hundred eyes. He was also the nymph Io’s brother. He was thus a very effective watchman, as only a few of the eyes would sleep at a time; there were always eyes still awake. Jeremy Benthem’s Panopticon, which in design allows a single watchman to observe an entire institutional building without the knowledge of its users, is named after Panoptes.
history
The innate dynamism of the modern economy, and of the culture that grows from this economy, annihilates everything that it creates: physical environments, social institutions, metaphysics, ideas, artistic visions, moral values in order to create more, to go on endlessly creating the world anew. This drive draws all modern men and women into its orbit, and forces us all to grapple with the question of what is essential, what is meaningful, what is real in the maelstrom in which we move and live. -Marshall Berman All that is Solid Melts into Air
THE UNITED STATES Much of discussion of the relatives benefits and failures of America’s urban renewal and slum clearance past has been largely sorted through by planners/policy makers/economists*. Outside of equity issues in the thriving metropolises of the United States (i.e. New York, San Francisco, Boston), attention has primarily shifted towards the rehabilitation of the many deleterious effects that accompanied the urban sprawl that created suburban America. Utilizing mid-century US policy seems like an irregular fit for analyzing current urban policy in the developing world. Although not technically considered to be part of the third world urban, Turkey currently exists at a pivotal point of urban planning policy.
As a recently developed country (in light of the likelihood that Turkey could join the European Union and the recent economic growth), the policies undertaken by the Turkish government in respect to development are increasingly important as a model by which other “second-world” countries develop urban policy. Although Turkey’s economy may arguably merit joining the ranks of first-world countries, it’s human rights policies still indicate that there is much work to be in done in terms of how to address the human costs of development. The history of these policies, and their American counterparts, will be displayed over the next few pages.
* William Collins and Kartharine Shester conducted a study, and presented an alternate view, of the economic effects of Slum Clearance in the United States in 2010. “From a city-level perspective, our estimates suggest that urban renewal led to higher median incomes and property values, faster population and housing stock growth, fewer old housing units, and (less precisely estimated) higher employment rates, fewer poor families, and fewer housing units without full plumbing. The patterns are consistent with the program spurring more central-city growth than otherwise would have occurred, rather than simply demolishing the left-hand tail of the housing quality distribution and pushing low-human-capital residents out of the city.” Images | Bunker Hill, Los Angeles circa 1900, Model of Bunker Hill Redevelopment, 1962
Formal housing policy in the United States took shape during the years proceeding industrialization. With the massive in-migration that accompanied the rise in factory work (a characteristic of most major cities in the third world at present day), the informal processes that governed local housing issues, both physically and socially, proved to be inadequate in adjusting to such a rapid densifying of the urban cores. It was necessary to develop systems for managing high concentrations of people with a distribution of responsibility among the different stakeholders in the urban housing world. Public housing policy (a brief timeline of which is shown below) underwent several stages of ideological association that preceded the slum clearances authorized by the Housing Act of 1949, which will be discussed later. In its earliest incarnations, public housing was simply a means by which to regulate building codes and public health standards, both of which suffered great 19th & Early 20th
decline, during the in-migration of industrialization. Subsequent to these first reforms, was the push for housing reforms that were aimed directly at socially rehabilitation the lower and and working middle class, who had been seen to have suffered a moral decline due to the conditions of urban life. Reformers such as Edith Elmer Wood, Louis Pink, Catharine Bauer and Lewis Mumford proposed model city alternatives as a possible remedy to the situation and are recommended for further reading regarding the matter. The Wagner Housing Act of 1937 established public housing programs to specifically address quality of life issues in the slums by establishing and authorizing a Federal Housing Authority to make loans, grants and annual contributions for local housing authorities to develop, acquire and manage housing projects.
1930s
WWII
during the Great Depression housing reformers see the need for massive reform of rental housing programs
from 1938-42 Congress progressively cuts funding for public housing programs and bans its use for low income housing
Centuries
housing advocates and reformers focus upon increasing sanitation & means of addressing the degraded morals and health of residents
building codes & model tenements
Housing Act of 1934 establishes Federal Housing Administration (FHA)
Housing Act of 1937
NAREB leads national “urban redevelopment� policy and advocated for the clearance of slums and the sale of land to private developers
The Wagner Housing Act, however, laid the road towards legitimizing slum clearance in requiring that one slum unit be demolished for every public housing unit built. With the exception of semi-temporary housing for war manufacturing laborers and a subsidized program to build cooperative, subsidized middle-class housing, public housing took a back seat during World War II. Much of the housing legislation during and directly proceeding the war was directed specifically to the returning veterans. In 1947, Truman ended the material subsidies for veteran housing, setting the stage for the Housing Act of 1949. The Housing Act of 1949 was a significant piece of legislation in that it drastically expanded the role of the federal government in public housing and the topography of urban areas in many American cities. The legislation afforded a distinct set of powers to federal governmental agencies including: Title 1: providing federal financing for slum clearance programs associated with urban renewal projects, Title II: increasing the authorization for FHA mortgage insurance, Title III: utilizing federal money to build 800,000 federal housing units.* There were several distinct tools utilized by agencies in regard to classifying slums and justifying the clearances. The most common came in the form of blight and eminent domain. Blight is a blanket term referring to properties that are dilapidated, unsafe or unsightly. Eminent domain allows for the required sale of property that is slated for public use. These concepts emerge in the current, and recent, policies undertaken by the Istanbul governing authorities in its urban renewal efforts as well.
* Lang, Robert E., and Rebecca R. Sohmer. 2001. “Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949: the past, present, and future of federal housing and urban policy�. Sage Urban Studies Abstracts. 29 (1): 3-135. Image | (left) The demolition of Pruitt Igoe, a hallmark failure of a modernist housing complex in St. Louis
** Lang and Shomer Image | (right) The Blue Mosque in the Balat District of Istanbul, formerly home to informal, working class residents and currently undergoing a rapid gentrification.
ISTANBUL The results of Title I had a significant effect on urban landscapes throughout the United States, with 21,000 distinct urban renewal projects completed and approximately $53 billion afforded (adjusted for inflation.) By 1966, 400,000 housing units had been cleared and 300,000 families dislocated. 57,000 acres in total were cleared utilizing the legislation and eminent domain with the following breakdown: 35% for residential development, 25% for streets/rights of way, 15% for industrial use, 13% for commercial, 11% for public or semi-public use.** Through arguably formal tools afforded by the Housing Act of 1949 (its appropriate to note here that no standard definition of blight exists in United States legal theory), federal authorities afforded themselves the power of systematic social control and erasure that Scott’s work directly refers to. Often time, massive legislative, domestic governmental actions reflect the application of prevalent ideological thought of the time. In the case of mid-century America, a modernist ethos that devalued the existing built environment and emphasized that large scale rebuilt environments would function as a panacea to not only rehabilitate marginalized populations but
The legacy of the Housing Act of 1949 exists primarily as a stain on American political history with arguable (most would argue deleterious) economic effects on the cities in which clearance occurred. Some cities were never able to rebound fully, others lost the sense of character and nuance that we now see as so essential to social health. Turkey, though the redevelopment efforts focused upon Istanbul, may face a similar struggle forward when looking back at the policies that are currently being implemented in the name of urban renewal and prosperity. Istanbul, the historical seat where the occident meets the orient, is undergoing a unique and pivotal point in its struggle for definition in the global age. At one point, it recognizes the need to become a “world-class� city, full of amenities in its quest to join the ranks of the first-world, and subsequently attract the type of economic activity inherent to major cities in the developed world. Alternately, it must at some levels adhere to the basic human rights afforded by first world countries to their citizens. Slum clearance throughout the third world, although unadvisable at best and inhumane at worst, has a somewhat lower level of international scrutiny than a city that is trying to define itself through attracting progressive, global enterprise.
GACEKONDUS In Turkish the term Gacekondus, meaning loosely “built at night”, is used to refer to informal settlements. There have been three basic types of Gacekondus in terms of formal recognition and the methods by which they can be cleared through legislative means. The settlements date, in large part, back to the early fifties. During this time, as was seen during industrialization at the turn of the century in the United States, the first large scale rural to urban in-migration occurred in Turkey. The dwellings went largely unregulated and evolved in real time with the needs of its inhabitants. (i.e. adding or subtracting to the size of dwellings, moving commercial activity as needed, etc.) Architect, planner and educator Akhtar Chauhan, has identified the benefit of informality
looking forward in identifying that informal settlements rarely contained elements of mono-functionality; a concept that has given way to a push for multi-functionality in planning for a future in terms of the realities of rising energy use and population density.* The attempted formalization (i.e. legibility) of the Gacenkondus initially took the form of extending “amnesties” during 1983-1987, in which many of the settlements acquired legal status.** However, in legalizing the status of informal settlements, building and zoning codes were applicable as well, clearing the way for designating blight. The Gacenkondus settlements formed after 1987 exist in a type of limbo in which there is no recognized land tenure system and protec
* www.archidev.org/IMG/doc/LEARNING_FROM_SLUMS.doc ** See for general Istanbul policy: Karaman O. 2013. “Urban Renewal in Istanbul: Reconfigured Spaces, Robotic Lives”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 37 (2): 715-733.
protection. The third type of Gacekundo are those that exist in the historic city center. In 2004-5 the Parliament passed a series of laws redefining the authority of municipal authorities, extending them far greater control over urban property management and granting them the right to execute urban transformation projects in collaboration with the Housing Development Administration (HDA). They specifically were afforded the ability to directly administer development project in deteriorated historic areas and historic monuments. The Gacekondus in the historic areas have undergone clearance, as has been seen in the neighborhood surrounding the Blue Mosque, through these legislative means.
Images |(top) New Condos in the Sulukule District. (middle) The approved design for the “Premier Campus Office� which is under construction and will be located in the Kagithane District. (bottom) The street that abuts the historic wall in the Sulukule District.
LEGIBLE INTERSECTIONS “What is new in high modernism, I believe, is not so much the aspiration for comprehensive planning. Many imperial and absolutist states have had similar aspirations. What are new are the administrative technology and social knowledge that make it plausible to imagine organizing an entire society in ways that only the barracks or the monastery had been organized before.”
In a comparative analysis of some of the general aspects of public housing/ clearance legislation between mid-century United States and current day Istanbul, it’s interesting to note how many similarities exist within the policies enacted. In a way, it is almost as if legislation, in many developing countries, has been lifted from western models and written into vastly different governing systems, with vastly different cultural histories. If policies were to have a DNA sequence, though, it would be readily apparent that the transposition of policy, within the much larger and complex issues of cultural and governance, would not thrive. Although Istanbul has been specifically isolated within Turkey to represent the neo-liberalization of the country, the structural context remains to be that of an authoritarian, Eastern state. The extent to which Istanbul’s urban renewal efforts relate to the authoritarian high modern state is subject to the same complexities of transposition. However, in a country where the average monthly wage of a semi-skilled worker is approximately $800 dollars* and the average price per sqaure foot of property is nearly $400* per square foot utilizing vouchers and advocating for public housing within the city is entirely different from the circumstances of mid-century urban America. However, the need to advocate for informal settlements that have become increasin-
gly subject to formalization processes design to suppress the inherent strengths of these communities and spur gentrification is a strong chord of connection between these two case studies. The quote from Scott above, written in the 80’s, has remained incredibly apposite. This basic fact was if the unifying element between my initial curiosity surrounding the effects of big data and the less obviously data driven research. We currently live in an age of an incredible access to data and the ability to locate and or quantify more things in our environment than ever. Within the dominant paradigm over the course of human history that knowledge is power, the tendency to try to quantify social advocacy and justice, especially in the case of its association with economic development, is so prevalent. Istanbul has been mapped by so many institutions and agencies that nearly every area is represented digitally and urban renewal plans have been submitted for many sites throughout the city. From the government, to research universities, to design firms, data abounds that can justify endless amounts of arguments and narratives about the past, present and future of the city. The way in which this digital archive is affecting the history of the city, its development and its inhabitants is the subject of the next section.
* Visit website for more info: https://www.joi.or.jp/modules/investment/custom/documents/TUR_1008_R-Labor_Cost.pdf ** glocalfinancialdata.com
theory
If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra. -Jean Buadrillard Simulacra and Simulations
In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament.
In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice.
In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery.
In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
ILLEGIBLE INTERSECTIONS Becoming Istanbul is an interactive database of media that has been compiled by various Turkish artists, architects, cartoonists, researchers, news media and cultural institutions. It’s a project that seeks to explore elements of Istanbul’s past in a referential nature to the current redefinition process that is accompanying the city’s urban renewal. One of the recurrent themes of this project has been that of the urban palimpsest, and its role in the physical and abstract topographies of cities. This project has been, and hopefully will continue to be, as much about palimpsest as it is about clearance, revision and redevelopment. The planning implications of historicity, and its importance as interwoven in the fabric of our built environment, is as important, if not more important now as it ever has been. In a world in which the physical erection of buildings occurs at a pace unequipped to conform to historical time and in which the construction of endless narratives through verifiable data a reflection on the importance of the informal built environment is a necessary function of looking forward to a holistic future. The protests that have been happening across Istanbul in response to the erasure of historicity highlights the gravity of maintaining the illegibility of data. Although this seems counterintuitive to many hands-on planning efforts, it remains as one of its most important traits.