The Emergence of Modern Istanbul: Transformation and Modernisation of a City.

• Author: Akcan, Esra
• Position: Book review

The Emergence of Modern Istanbul: Transformation and Modernisation of a City

By Murat Gul

London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012, 242 pages, ISBN 9781780763743.

IN ISTANBUL, architectural ideas on how to transform Taksim Square can get you killed. A case in point would be the recent police violence over Gezi Park in Taksim, which began as a public protest against the undemocratic planning of the prime minister's "delirious projects" for Istanbul. Sadly and ironically, the first democratically elected prime minister in Turkey's history, Adnan Menderes, was the target of violence about half a century ago, when he was sentenced to death partially based on the charges against his urban projects in Istanbul. Murat Gul's book The Emergence of Modern Istanbul: Transformation and Modernisation of a City effectively tells a 150-years long story of urban transformation that culminated in the Menderes' execution. While the author devotes his most detailed last chapter, one of his major scholarly contributions and conclusion to the Menderes years, he also provides a much needed and useful synthesis of scholarly works that describe Istanbul's dramatic transformation during the late Ottoman, early Republican, and postwar Democrat Party (Menderes) periods. "Mid-nineteenth century Istanbul was chaotic, overcrowded, poorly sewered, badly administered, prone to catastrophic fires and plagued with ineffective transportation systems. A century later the city was a metropolis with large avenues, postwar modernist architecture and city blocks which had swept away much of its traditional nineteenth century street pattern and altered its urban form." (p.1)

A clear periodization guides the chapter structure. The book moves the reader from the first "cracks" in classical Ottoman Istanbul during the late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries; to the years of Mahmut II; to the ambitious modernization projects of Abdulhamid II; to the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, and the French planner Henri Prost's influential projects between 1933 and 1950; and finally to the rise and fall of the Democrat Party that the author divides into two periods, the early unobtrusive period and the late interventionist years under Menderes's heavy-handed guidance until 1960. The chapters on Prost and Menderes are by far the most detailed, as these are the two individuals who shaped the most influential projects and the dramatic transformations of modern Istanbul during the first...