With sustainability, environment ceased to beresistant against the growth-seeking human actions and employed a new, cooperative role that legitimizes human interference with the built-environment.Social responsibility and environmental protection,once impeached for hindering the economic growth, have gained new exchange values in the economy of concepts, of which the use value is,however, derived from nothing but the world of commodities.

The reappearance of environmental consciousness, now wrapped up with the scientific method and technology, has paved the way for new desires to reshape the urban space, while creating its own leeway into linguistics with the invention of terms such as “green building”, “sustainable design”, “eco-friendliness”, natural materials”, etc. This innovation not only changed the limits and obligations of the architect’s vision, but it has also transformed the way urban projects communicate to the public bydeveloping a new vocabulary for urban transformation. Constituting counter-evidence against the logocentricview, this new vocabulary is turning out to be one of the pillars of actual change in the city, while transformers of urban space enjoy a new subject position interpellated by the discourse of sustainability.
Parallel to the rest of the world, the language of sustainability has begun spreading in Istanbul, through conferences, PR activities of urban projects and through the website of the government run housing agency, the Housing Development Administration of Turkey (TOKİ), as well. However, recent urban projects grimly prove that the ability of sustainability to establish a harmonic relationship among the society, economy and environmentis being traded for its power tocreate a new ideological space where urban projects can only be discussed within the borders of sustainability. But, what sustainability means is still not clear.
Agencies like TOKİ enjoy the benefits of this ambiguity, which allow them to exploit the term by including it in their mission statements andrandomly label their projects sustainable even though they are involved in projects like Sulukule or Bezirganbahçe. Disregarding the socio-economic damages that were created through the displacement of people from the land they grew up, demolition of communities, evaporation of the cultural capital and disruption of the habitus, TOKİ and its counterparts can still claim the field of sustainability by asserting that the aim of urban renewal projects is to provide remedy for poverty and create a sustainable urban space [2]. While in some instances sustainability occurs in the form of energy conservation[3], in many cases it is translated simply as the goodwill of ecologic consciousness, where some gated communities promote it by adding some solar panels on their roofs or using bamboo materials in a limited portion of their space to prove their effortsfor using quickly regenerating materials. Nevertheless, almost all of these projects rely on cement and extruded polystyrene foams which are among the most carbon producing and hard-to-recycle materials.

These contradictions are nothing but simply the utilization of the vast conceptual space left behind the absence of thorough definition sustainability, supported with a regulating body of clearly defined indicators. Therefore, as Jay[4] puts it, maybe the “crude formula should suggest the specificity of asking where politics takes place, for politics now appear as a name for economy that denominates, distributes and reproduces values and properties.” The discursive field opened up by sustainability is a new opportunity for urban politics. Whether this field will be encapsulated within science and technology -“perhaps the most politically charged and ideologically repressed discourse of our epoch”[5] – or be expanded to include the questions raised by social sciences will determine the shape of the future city.

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