On Istiklal Cd, we discovered a bookshop named Robinson Crusoe, one of the oldest English language bookshops in Istanbul. We went in to check out the titles, and discovered this excellent book published by Phaidon Press:
Although we were not about to pay the 70 USD to purchase the book, some online sleuthing discovered the organization that published it, called Urban-Age [view their website here]. This book was published in partnership with the London School of Economics, and addresses many of the issues that face megacities, and makes case studies of a number of them. Istanbul, we were happy to discover, was included in the list.
Although I have not had the chance to review the entire publication that they make available online [a 50 page newspaper, if you would like to download it please click UrbanAgeIstanbulNewspaper_en], in thumbing through it I have already found some very valuable information. In my initial post, I briefly alluded to the exceptional nature of Istanbul in that it has a very extremely old city center, with aging infrastructure, coupled with extremely rapid growth on the periphery, which causes a number of problems for its residents– how to move them from place to place, make sure that their support systems are adequate, etc. The growth has far outstripped the city’s capacity to plan its own growth, leading the citizens to take building into their own hands, ringing the city in informal housing called gegekondos, To illustrate this growth, and to show you just how old the regions we will be studying are, I have taken this image from the Urban-Age report.
As you can see, both Fener-Balat and Suleymaniye are located on one of the oldest occupied regions in Istanbul. Our own neighborhood of Beyoglu, where the Galata Tower is located, has been prominent since before the 15th century. But the rest of the city has only come into existence in the past 40 years or so.
The Istanbul Project 