a thousand streets
“… ‘Times have changed’ does not simply mean that some things have disappeared. It means that they have become impossible: they don’t belong any longer to what the new times make possible. The empirical idea of time as a succession of moments has been substituted by an idea of time as a set of possibilities. ‘Times have changed’ means: this is no longer possible. And that which a state of things readily declares impossible is, quite simply, the possibility to change the state of things. That impossibility thus works as an interdiction: there are things you can no longer do, ideas in which you can no longer believe, futures that you can no longer imagine. ‘You cannot’ clearly means: you must not.”
Jacques Rancière, “In What Time Do We Live?” in The State of Things, Koenig Books, London 2012
For around five years beginning in late 2012 I have taken many photographs in İzmir to make a book titled “Atlas of Smyrna/İzmir.” It stayed unpublished and a pdf version is available on this website. I have compiled the images side by side in certain ‘typologies’ until I realized how personal (and rather random) these urban ‘types’ are. I think I consider this as a result of selective-artistic and ‘design’ preferences, rather than the results of a scholarly research. In the architectural side of the compilation I had concentrated very much on either the surviving examples of historical buildings (meaning pre-Turkish Republic: ie. Greek and Armenian, mostly houses and shops) or the public buildings of early republic and some modern examples of streets and urban sites as well as panoramas. These went hand in hand with the narrative that I tried to build up in the book, concerned with imagining a Mediterranean city before a catastrophic fire, and before the advent of vicious nationalisms: A multi-cultural, multi-lingual and cosmopolitan city slightly on the provincial side. The images also helped grappling with the remembrance of the things past in a city I grew up around fifty years ago as a kid. What was mostly left out in this ‘atlas’ was a kind of ‘modern vernacular,’ with lives and aspirations of hundreds of thousands of people pertaining to, as if they would be revealed on the streets and facades.
These thousand(s) of streets existed for more than fifty years, some possibly for seventy when considering the exodus in Turkey from the countryside to the cities beginning in the 1950s. Indeed they have changed drastically since then, rebuilt, in certain cases two times over to what they are now, still waiting for yet another ‘regeneration.’ The encroachment of high rise residences upon these areas are visible in some images. Even when some houses and apartments on these streets show signs of dilapidation and neglect, they do not shelter the poorest in the city. Only few, the streets conquered by small scale manufacturing and the ones condemned next to the high rise developments, temporarily house the poorest of refugees from Syria and elsewhere. Otherwise, one can view them as the habitat for residents with higher hopes, a second and third generation somewhat benefiting from value added on the initial plot, some with a new car parked in front, but still confined in a modest income.
As far as typologies are concerned, a kind of modern-vernacular of this kind has dominated cities in Turkey for a long time. The variations on the theme sometimes refer to the location and value of the urban lot, and sometimes to the climate and local habits, i.e. as in the case of İzmir with larger balconies and windows, lighter colors and material. In this case of the vernacular, the architecture is not exactly without architects: most buildings are based on projects signed by an architect, a structural and a mechanical engineer, and approved by the local authority. But then the construction, materials, physical outlook, the facade and the interiors are very much shaped by the cooperation of small time contractors and owners. This collaboration is also prone to infringe on the structural aspects of building. In the end, what makes up the anonymous outlook of these city-scapes are the popular taste and trends as they fit the owner’s budget, rather than the architectural-tectonic properties of proportion, harmony and restraint in applied materials and color. Unlike the real (i.e. rural) vernacular, the knowledge of this practice is not transferred from one generation to the next, and its actors are as fickle as the fad of the new building materials. In fact, one can only claim to be a local in a city for whom this anonymous residential architecture becomes invisible in daily life. In the case of extremes, i.e. as in mega-cities of Africa and south Asia, one can declare to be a local only in one of the several cities contained in a single name.
Since I have made the book, Google maps’ street view had covered almost all of İzmir except for the streets in most impoverished neighborhoods. One can say that a major part of the atlas of a city in frozen time resides online for all to view, to look around and to navigate. Tragically, this is also true for the Turkish cities devastated by the earthquakes of February 6th 2023, their former selves still frozen in Google maps today. In a way, the anonymous architecture and streets of Turkish cities and towns are like the scenes of the crime foretelling their fortune even before the disaster strikes, while the criminal network encompasses a complex web that ultimately touches the central government. Much had been said and written about the defiance of science and rationality when faced with the ruins and unspeakable grief. Meanwhile, with all reasoning aside, it would take some imagination to feel yet a minuscule share of this loss and the deferred future on the facades which are still intact all over the country. While Jacques Rancière writes on the repressive forms of the present time to keep the status quo, he also suggests the ways to emancipation by employing different temporalities as opposed to the ‘sole speed of the development of capital,’ to oppose time of the individual to that of the global time, to burst open the possible futures…
June 2023