7,500 American Dollars per m2 is the price you have to pay if you want an office near the most important square of Istanbul. Seems reasonable, right? Until recently though, the area where the office is located was occupied by people in the poorest portion of the population, and the neighborhood’s name was associated with [...]
A 8,500 year-old archaeological site is not a common element that one comes across in a metropolitan area. In the Yenikapi neighborhood in Istanbul, 35 Byzantine ships were uncovered making the site the home to the biggest ship collection ever excavated, claiming the record from the Danish Nord ships. In addition, a 8,500 year-old Neolithic [...]
Works of architecture that are aimed for the public almost always bear political connotations. However, when incompetence in understanding the relationship between architecture and public use is present in those who are in charge, outcomes are, to say the least, funny. The most recent example I have seen is the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip [...]
I was fortunate enough to see a very insightful exhibition called Favela-City Exchange on the future of the favelas (squatter settlements) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, prepared by the architecture and urban planning group, Urban Think Tank (UTT), based in ETH Zurich. A little background on UTT: UTT, led by the architects Alfredo Brillembourg and [...]
I am in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for a 6-week long program, and my next two posts will be on the urban planning issues of Rio. Rio de Janeiro is known, among other things, for its urban poverty and squatter settlements (or in the Brazilian case favelas). I have had a chance to visit the [...]
Recently, a very important decision has been made that could set up a milestone on how the slum areas in Istanbul, Turkey are treated by the authorities in charge of urban renewal. Sulukule neighborhood, in Istanbul, which used to house a Romani community, was demolished and its residents were relocated to public housing projects built [...]
Needless to say, water is essential to sustain human life, and every human being has the right to have access to water. Therefore, in urban areas where great numbers of people are agglomerated, water is a critical issue. In Istanbul there are 8 watersheds, 5 being on the European side and 3 on the Asian [...]
In a special advertorial sponsored by Turkey’s Mass Housing Administration (MHA) in one of the issues of the UN-HABITAT’s Urban World magazine, MHA states that transforming existing slums “makes up approximately 10 percent of our total housing development. […] Moreover, it should be emphasized that wherever we build housing, we take into consideration the great [...]
When Le Corbusier made his famous Plan Voisin proposal in 1925, he was basically designing, not just a city, but an ideal life for the users who were going to live there. That’s how the concept of “towers in a park” came about, and it parceled the urban planning programs all over the world in [...]
Urban relocation is often used, whether justifiably or not, as a part of the urban renewal project of Istanbul in its endeavor to become a “world-city.” As the main actor to carry out urban renewal projects, Mass Housing Administration has the authority to relocate squatter communities whenever it’s deemed appropriate, and usually these communities are relocated to [...]
There is a strong paradigm shift in the literature recently, on how rural development and urban development affect one another. The conventional wisdom of the last three decades suggests that urban and rural developments are separate and compete with each other for resources. However, a closer looks reveals that this is far from the truth. [...]
Taksim Square, in Istanbul, Turkey, is one of the liveliest public spaces in the city. It was a part of the modernization project of the newly-formed republic in the late 1930s. Like many other parts of the city, it was based on the plans of Henri Prost, the prominent representative of the French school of [...]
