Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern

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СКАЧАТЬ is surely true that Istanbul is not what it once was, and equally true that the city has exploded in population over the past hundred years: a city that at the dawn of the twentieth century had something like three-quarters of a million residents now has more than fourteen million. The overwhelming bulk of that growth is poor villagers, mostly from eastern Anatolia, crowding the urban edges in sprawling unregulated settlements. They come to alleviate their rural poverty while (ironically and predictably) contributing mightily to the economic woes of Istanbul.

      Pamuk is not being melodramatic: there is no question that Turkey in general and Istanbul in specific is struggling more than maybe ever before, with little obvious relief in sight.

      To see the city in black and white, to see the haze that sits over it and breathe in the melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate, you need only to fly in from a rich western city and head straight to the crowded streets; if its winter every man on the Galata Bridge will be wearing the same pale, drab, shadowy clothes. The Istanbullus of my era have shunned the vibrant reds, greens, and oranges of their rich, proud ancestors; to foreign visitors, it looks as if they have done so deliberately, to make a moral point. They have not—but there is in their dense gloom a suggestion of modesty. This is how you dress in a black-and-white city, they seem to be saying; this is how you grieve for a city that has been in decline for a hundred and fifty years.¹⁹

      But that’s exactly what I’ve done: it’s winter and I have just flown in from a rich western city, and right now I don’t see what the hell he’s talking about. I am standing on the Galata Bridge looking at palaces and the sparkling, blue Golden Horn and a million boats and ferries and ships all looking like they have somewhere to go. There are shoulder-to-shoulder people fishing, it’s a bright day in early December and I am in reverie. It’s freaking Istanbul and it’s ridiculously beautiful. The calls to prayer crackle from loudspeakers mounted on the mosques looming in the hills, there are people selling stuff everywhere, and beautiful yalis²⁰ crowd up tight on the Bosporus.

      I don’t see a pervasive melancholy. I’m a visitor and I fall stupidly in love with the city within days of arriving. The Galata Bridge becomes one of my favorite places in the world. The aesthetic Pamuk calls pale and drab I read as Euro-style. The whole place seems alive with an energy that I am unfamiliar with. Of course, I don’t see Pamuk’s huzun; Westerners like me rarely see it through the haze of orientalism.

      But it is true; the inevitable, fatalistic decline of Istanbul is something that in time I hear spoken of very often. Many of my friends have a resigned, good-natured assumption of the city’s slow free-fall into oblivion. “You like it here? Really? Why?” People often speak of the size and chaos of the city as untenable, as impossible to really live in, the city as lost, beyond help, beyond repair, to be temporarily tolerated at best.

      The easy shot would be to describe Istanbul and Vancouver as two cities going in opposite directions, one heading down, the other on its way up, waving as they go by. There’s something there, and it does feel like Istanbul’s fatalistic sense of decline is mirrored by Vancouver’s ebullience, punctuated by British Columbia’s cringe-worthy current marketing tagline: The Best Place on Earth.

      But I’m not really sure that’s it, or maybe that’s just a part of it. That whole construct seems a little too facile, a little too temporary to sit with entirely. There is a lot to suggest that Vancouver is not really a city in the historical sense, but more akin to a boom-town, and comparing its fortunes to Istanbul is like comparing Las Vegas to London: right now, in any case, they are just two different categories of settlement.

      Istanbul can be seen as an urban flow—it has been the capital of three different empires: Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman, and has a collective urban memory measured in millennia—while it remains questionable if Vancouver is really even a real city yet. In all honesty, Vancouver is still a small city of a half million people with another one and a half million sprawled out in suburbs vomiting off to the east. It’s definitely getting closer, but what will it take to make a real city here?

      And what is “real” city anyway? I think many of us have a visceral idea: a liveliness, a vitality, a concentrated structural and cultural environment, a density. I asked Frances Bula, who writes about urban affairs for pretty much everywhere, what she thought about the question:

      It is true that when I come back to Vancouver from New York or Toronto it often feels like Winnipeg in the middle of winter here. There’s just so little action. It’s not just the size of the city, it’s the volume and diversity of things to do and look at—it’s really diversity that a dense population brings. You have to have a critical mass of people living within a defined boundary. You just can’t have a real city without density. While the downtown is very dense, single-family dwellings dominate the city and we have to find ways to build the liveliness and bustle of downtown in other neighborhoods. There is that feel in some places, but we really need a lot more. It doesn’t have to be miles and miles of super-density, but concentrated high streets, pockets of real density, to focus neighborhoods.

      That density or lack thereof has long been the subject of much hand-wringing in Vancouver, but over the last couple of decades that has changed dramatically, at least in the downtown core, and the city has been able to densify downtown in a reversal that has caught the eye of urbanists and planners across the globe.

      Did you know that Vancouver has more high-rises per capita than any other city in North America? It’s true, although those skyscrapers don’t really scrape all that much of the sky. The city is considered to have a “mid-rise” skyline and most big buildings in the downtown only have a height of around 90 to 130 meters (295 to 426 feet), with the highest being the newly complete Shangri-La²¹ at 197 meters (646 feet) tall or sixty-one stories.

      In large part, these subdued heights are a product of strict guidelines that maintain view corridors in the downtown. The height limits are part of trying to protect sightlines both within and below the high-rises of the surrounding ocean and mountains. Those guidelines allow special sites to exceed the guidelines to add some diversity, but the desire to maintain the views has kept the heights down, even while the actual buildings multiply like bunnies.

      That skyline—and the residential density it has ushered in—is the subject of much admiration and what many observers point to first when they talk about why Vancouver is “getting it right.” Vancouver’s now-celebrated urbanism is built around the idea of convincing people to move in from the suburbs, to stop sprawling, and to come live on the downtown peninsula. The strategy is called Living First and is perhaps the signature accomplishment of Vancouver’s contemporary urbanism; it stimulated one local journalist enough to call it, “the greatest urban experiment to take place in Canada in half a century, one that has made Vancouver the envy of city planners across the continent.”²²

      The towers that all those people are moving into overwhelmingly take a very particular form: tall, slim, view-preserving glass towers sitting on a podium of two or three-story townhouses that are specifically designed to be welcoming to families. This form, with slight variations, dominates huge swaths of the city core. “There were exactly six of them in downtown Vancouver a decade ago; now there are more than one thousand.”²³

      They may be popular but they are not pretty: wall after wall of sterile, glassy towers with upscale, faux-brick townhouse bases on the bottom. Those towers may not be much to look at, but they are a very convenient model for mass replication that keeps everybody happy. The small footprints and number of units ensure high profit margins, the townhouses lure some families back downtown, and the whole thing is designed for density. Very tidy.

      It is definitely true that Vancouver’s downtown density has jumped up remarkably, to the point where it is often claimed to have the highest downtown residential density in North СКАЧАТЬ