Abstract
İpek Türeli’s Istanbul Open City: Exhibiting Anxieties of Urban Modernity is an in-depth study of the exhibitionary sites of Istanbul that visually represent various urban anxieties, such as the destruction of historical buildings, overwhelming population growth, housing shortages and other concerns about the future of the country. She follows an illustrative approach to urban history by analysing the social and political connotations behind the dominant visual aspects of Istanbul. Türeli additionally examines a variety of visually stimulating materials, such as the cinema, old photographs, public exhibitions, panorama museums and theme parks, while explaining that the aim of her book is ‘to highlight cultural creativity by examining the diverse and shifting ways Istanbul residents have defined themselves while debating, imagining, building and consuming their city’ (p. 7).
Discussions concerning urban transformation and massive construction projects in post-1980s’ Istanbul, as a neoliberal phenomenon, often overshadow similar, yet seldom addressed, urban transformation experiences of the 1950s. Along with Murat Gül’s The Emergence of Modern Istanbul: Transformation and Modernisation of a City (2009) and Sibel Bozdoğan and Esra Akcan’s Modern Architectures in History: Turkey (2012), Türeli’s book constitutes a rare and comprehensive body of work that sheds light on this frequently understudied period of Istanbul’s post-Second World War urban history. She additionally offers an important contribution to urban modernity literature, as it propels the issue of Turkish modernity to the forefront of a relatively new and fertile territory of study.
The first two chapters focus on the urban anxiety caused by the invasion of rural immigrants in Turkey. Starting during the second decade of the 20th century, thousands of rural people began moving to Istanbul with the hope of living better lives. These internal migrations caused concern for many of Istanbul’s urbanites. Türeli initially examines these concerns through the lens of well-known Turkish photographer, Ara Güler. Originally a photo-journalist, Güler depicted the living and working conditions of the urban poor and working class in various photographs and photo-essays during the 1950s. His photographs captured the infrastructural modernization and rapid urbanization taking place in Istanbul. Güler’s increasingly circulated newspaper photo-essays brought attention to the arrival of new waves of rural immigrants, which heightened public anxiety among urban Istanbulites (p. 31). Beginning in the early 1990s, people started recirculating Güler’s old black-and-white photographs on the walls of art galleries, within the pages of coffee-table books, and in nostalgic cosmopolitan venues. These commodified nostalgic photographs, which were originally featured only in print newspapers, reinvigorated the multiethnic and multireligious past of the city for many contemporary urbanites by painting a socially colourful future for the city (pp. 39-42).
Similar to Güler’s black-and-white photographs, old films also play an important role in the visualization of Istanbul’s past. In the second chapter, Türeli analyses three films – Halit Refig’s Birds of Exile (1964), Metin Erksan’s Bitter Life (1963), and Ertem Göreç and Vedat Türkali’s Bus Passengers (1960) – while studying relationships between memory, media and the city. These films again mainly deal with rural-to-urban immigration and the urbanization of Istanbul through apartmentization. They criticize the unplanned infrastructural transformation and corruption related to real-estate speculation. For Türeli, these films are of significant documentary value because ‘they have transformed into memory objects as they circulate in contemporary visual culture’ (p. 70). The return of these old films, just like the recirculation of Gϋler’s photographs, creates a certain sense of nostalgia related to old historic housing in the city.
In the fourth chapter, Türeli examines this anxiety of losing historical houses. Historical wooden houses were claimed as cultural assets in the 1970s, following the construction of thousands of modern concrete-frame apartment buildings, in an effort to protect vernacular housing from rampant urbanization. She discovers and discusses the people and methods behind the heritagization process while addressing the institutionalization of historic preservation as it relates to marketing cities (a common phenomenon after the 1970s). Türeli additionally highlights the involvement of institutions, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Council of Europe, which are involved in the preservation of historical districts. Differently from other reconstruction projects in Europe, Istanbul-based preservation actors insisted on emphasizing the national character of these houses rather than focusing on their common heritage in relation to the rest of the continent. This emphasis on the national character also related to the preservation of Ottoman history associated with these historical houses. As Türeli explains, ‘The Ottoman/Turkish house was a category first constructed within the nation-building policies of the late Ottoman and early Republican era’ (p. 96). The visualization of the Ottoman Istanbul through these houses was important for nationalistic discourse and a focal point of later exhibitionary sites.
After the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) victory in the 2002 elections, the tendency of public officials to connect themselves with their Ottoman ancestors related more visibly to the party’s Islamist and conservative roots. AKP’s neo-Ottomanist approach, both in foreign and domestic policies, created concerns about the secular population of the country. As Türeli states, ‘national unity has long been a source of collective paranoia in Turkey’ (p. 117). Following the Second World War, the rise of Islamist and Kurdish movements along with separatist movements in the Middle East and the Balkans fuelled fear of national sovereignty (p. 117).
The fifth and sixth chapters of the book focus on the visualizations of the above anxieties and of Turkey’s uncertain future. The fifth chapter is about the design and political context of Miniaturk, Turkey’s first national-themed park. Opened in 2003, the park features over one hundred miniature models of historical Ottoman and Turkish structures aimed at bringing attention to the city’s urban regeneration campaign (p. 108). According to Türeli, the symbolic message of Turkey’s multicultural past is a dominant theme of the park, reflected in both the choice and the placement of its monuments. Churches, synagogues and mosques, for example, are separated from their urban context and exhibited next to each other in the park. Miniaturk also displays Republican architecture; it publicizes Atatürk’s Mausoleum and the Selimiye Mosque in related promotional materials (p. 122). Miniaturk, through the use of nostalgia, Ottoman cosmopolitanism, and the Islamic-Turkish character of the country, emphasizes tolerance in Turkey and changing notions of citizenship in the globalizing city of Istanbul (p. 110).
In the final chapter, Türeli investigates Panorama 1453, another popular museum, which commemorates the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul. In contrast to the Miniaturk’s emphasis on multiculturalism, Panorama 1453 repeats the nationalist narrative of conquest (p. 133). Battle scenes and the depictions of the victory of Muslim Turks over Christian Byzantines also relate to modern politics and AKP’s ‘re-conquest of the city by the commodity and capital’ (p. 134). These last two chapters, in the light of the contemporary political tendencies, do an ample job explaining the partisan and physical context surrounding Miniaturk and Panorama 1453, the former a theme park and the latter a panorama museum dedicated to Turkish history.
Overall, Istanbul Open City successfully reveals and explains the relationships between urban anxieties and the media through the thoughtful investigation of photojournalism, cinema, theme parks and museums. The book covers a large span of time from the 1950s to today, boasting an eclectic narrative. The book also functions as a reference work, with each chapter written as a stand-alone entry. When read in succession, however, the chapters establish continuity of affiliation between exhibition sites and their depictions of urban anxieties. Türeli’s interdisciplinary approach keeps the material interesting for readers hailing from different scholarly fields, such as cultural studies, art, history, urban geography and anthropology. Her use of explanatory language makes the book digestable for academics lacking background in Turkish history or Istanbul’s past. Türeli ultimately interprets the anxieties of the Istanbulites and how they imagine the future of their city – a place where media representations and urban issues of the past affect the present.