Here is an other intervention by Boğaçhan Dündaralp for Haliç Center Project, curated by Maurizio Bortolotti within Adhocracy Exhibition.

Two questions examining its position both in the axis of space-context and ‘in today’s urban structure’ on a more global scale.

How to analyze the “Haliç Center Project” in the axis of space-context from the approaches put forth by Yona Friedman?

When we look at the architectural approach which Yona Friedman has maintained since the 1960s, we see that he has focused on different architectural media such as books, guides and organizations, researching ‘technical’ facilities, infrastructures, productions, communication models, which displays the use of different tools triggering people’s way of self-building.

Yona Friedman’s Haliç Center Project is an installment of the city-bridge idea developed in 1963 in parallel with the utopian architectural projects of the 60′s known as “Age of megastructures;” in which the bridge was used as an infrastructure.

Friedman’s idea of city-bridge (spatial city), mobile (flexible) architectural researches and studies contain urban experiences after the War. Given the conditions of war or disastrous environments, survival, deprivation, destitution and poverty, these are very important and up-to-date studies in the sense that they seek for the ways in which self-organization and self-build methods are implemented, decision-making mechanisms leave their place to communication models and the basic principles of participatory design are investigated.

The 1960s was the period when Turkey started implementing a planned economy, the scarcity of capital was the most important factor and the already scarce capital was allocated to the industry. During this period of time when the capital allocated to urbanization and housing was minimized due to the cost of rapid industrialization, ‘Gecekondu’ (shanty town) emerged as, with the words of İlhan Tekeli, “an innovative solution for the economy although it was seen as a problem by the bureaucracy, architects and planners who internalized the modernist legitimacy.” It is a great loss for this geography that the discussions and similarities between Friedman’s approaches and the emergence of “Gecekondu” (shanty towns) during this period were neglected. The Van earthquake in 2011 demonstrates that the traumas and housing problems after the Kocaeli earthquake in 1999 failed to be examined in the bureaucracy-planner-architect axis and a platform was not created to transmit those experiences to today. Likewise the modernist planning and architectural trends in this geography at that time whose energy did not produce alternative approaches, Istanbul’s urban transformation movements supported by the neo-liberal policies and power dynamics are different from their counterparts in the world. They destroy the Gecekondu (shanty towns) and violate the “right to housing” policies and therefore, do not produce alternative approaches.
Despite its posteriority, Yona Friedman was invited to Istanbul Design Biennial to presented a project open to communication, The Haliç Center Project. What exactly does this project depict in the context of the explanations above and in the axis of place-context?
Yona Friedman rejecting the utopian labels attributed to him, states that he always strove to develop and realize feasible projects.

The Haliç Center Project reduces the Golden Horn to ‘the water’ and the two sides of the Golden Horn to two different social fabrics by excluding the historicity and the urban-contextual importance of the space.’ This reduction omits the historic peninsula, the perception of the city and ‘bridge- silhouette’ debates in Istanbul’s agenda. Departing from Yona’s approach; even though this proposal was expected to trigger the feasible, to focus on ‘human’ and to take its strength from the ‘space’ and the socio-cultural accumulation of the ‘space,’ it seems that it, neither as an utopia nor as a potential of a context, achieved to gain a position.

Moreover, when placed in the context of Istanbul-Golden Horn, this installment, apart from being a speculation or used as an infrastructure, turns into a design which is unrelated to the existing ‘Space,’ and does not use the existing infrastructure (bridge). By building a new infrastructure (bridge); it reduces the Space to an area containing only a potential in which what is proposed is produced and transported externally.
Trying to position the issue within the time-space context through this work which doesn’t establish a direct relationship with contemporary Istanbul and the current uırban practices, maybe we should ask the following question:

The city, which is transformed with the neo-liberal policies today, puts its own-initiative approach to a problematic position. How does the approach of Yona Friedman since the 1960s, which points out urban dwellers and the citizens transforming their own living spaces and public spaces freely with participatory practices, position itself within the neo-liberal urban demolition today? In this context, questions such as ‘which utopia?’ and ‘utopia for whom?’ become crucial today.

Manifestos work like the ancient prophets, who by the power of their vision create their own people. Today’s social movements have reversed the order, making manifestos and prophets obsolete. Agents of change have already descended into the streets and occupied city squares, not only threatening and toppling rulers but also conjuring visions of a new world.
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, declaration, 2012

The transformation practice of the world cities of today is to divide the metropolitan cities into parts which expand to vast areas and are connected with the globalization. These dynamics put a violent pressure which destroys, displaces and transforms the social structures as well as the urban fabric. The pace of this dynamic dissolution also destroys the alternative living facilities by excluding the social and physical structures in the cities and their areas of initiative and freedom.

Yona Friedman’s work on the urban installation called “spatial city” which also includes ‘mobile architecture’ studies consists of spaces led by the request of users (also proposed in the Haliç Center Project), urban spaces formed organically through relationships between users, multi-functional compact urban models including possible situations which turn into spaces through intervention, game and random actions. Therefore, we can say that these models still include the up- to-date tactics and tools for today’s urban residents.

So, how can these utopian approaches deal with contemporary urban protocols?

Against the large regional transformation movements determined by today’s urban policies, we can say that similar tactics and tools which are expected to meet the demands of the urban citizens emerge as informal micro-scale spatial gestures formed by everyday life and consensus and avoid the normative elements. In fact, we see that many actors who are interested in the city and space start to be involved in these productions by creating a variety of initiatives and penetrating into everyday life.

Although ideas, methods, tactics, and these approaches which keep up to date as instruments become sources of what is still current; when macro-scale, modernist proposals such as the Haliç Center Project turn into the imagination of not the process but what is produced we can say that they cannot come into contact with the realities of today’s city and lose their actuality.

So how is it that the face, know-how and knowledge of these studies which have been up-to-date for 60 years can reproduce a relationship with the cities and the citizens of today by ridding themselves of the representations of the modernist world which focused on the problems of the industrial cities of the 1950s?

I think the answer lies in the analysis of how to establish a ground on which the infrastructure potential will be presented by the city’s existing landscape, which will put the tools into use to ultimately re-unite this infrastructure with this knowledge and which will make citizens active. Today’s social movements and vision of the new world, as pointed out by Hardt and Negri, do not take their strength from manifestos or dominant subjectivities with social purposes, however, they take it from anonymous, collective, non-hierarchical movements. This knowledge can be kept sustainable not only by reproducing Yona Friedman’s answers as in the Haliç Center Project, but can be done by asking his questions again and searching for answers in today’s conditions in its context.

Boğaçhan Dündaralp, architect
www.ddrlp.com
www.boğaçhandundaralp.wordpress.com