Urban Space Travel Writing The City

[Journal extract] The cobbled pavements teem with a buzzing frenzy of people. Tourists, locals, street-sellers and punters create a steady stream of bodies, flowing consistently through the narrow streets of this heaving city. Whether you love or hate it, Istanbul is without doubt a city that splits opinion. For some, it is an exotic metropolis – steeped in rich history and culture – pulsating with modern life. For others, the city environment is pure chaos. Many local people feel that Istanbul is over-crowded and over-developed; a suffocating and homogenised urban landscape, representative of the negative consequences of capitalist culture. The fact is, both the physical place and conceptual space of Istanbul remains at odds with the sheer quantities of people that inhabit the city; Istanbul is one of the most over-crowded cities in the world with a population of approximately 15 million. The city sprawls over 2,063 square miles, spanning the Bosphorus Strait that separates East and West, forming the largest urban agglomeration in Europe and the Middle East. For me, this colossal city is the very definition of contradiction. Everything here happens in the extremes and changes rapidly. Around the corner from my flat in Galata, a small independent pop-up shop sells foreign coffee, fair-trade T-Shirts and illustrated posters that read: Istanbul. They call it chaos, we call it home. I buy one to remind myself why I like living amid the pandemonium of this urban space, in all its gloriously paradoxical charm. Istanbul is a patchwork of dazzlingly busy spaces that never seem to sleep and for this reason it can at times be an exhausting, even claustrophobic, place to inhabit. However, historically Istanbulians have always conducted their business in the open, always out on the street. There is an inherent sense here that outdoor space belongs to the public. The streets are occupied daily with tradesmen selling their wares, exchanging produce and sharing stories. Unlike the common conception of public space in large cities in the Western world, the streets of Istanbul have traditionally been considered as an open playground, within which trade, performance art and food culture thrives. However, despite the vibrancy of Istanbul’s street culture, the outdoor areas of the city have become intimidatingly hectic and over-crowded. Today, the metropolis is one of concrete with an ever-rising population... [Extract continues on the complex issue of public urban spaces]