 We are now moving from some of the key themes that had been raised in the last session in talking about the narratives of cities and the built environment by looking at what this means in terms of the shape and the layering of histories of cities themselves. Aswa Aksoi is chairing the session with me. She is one of the key figures who's been looking at the sociological relations and the spatial relations in this city and a critical member of Bilgi University and also a member of the team that has helped us shape this conference. To speak on these issues, we're going to start with Hashim Sarkis. Hashim is the Aga Khan professor of landscape architecture and urbanism from the Graduate School of Design. He is an old friend. He's from Beirut which is more or less where I met him and he will be speaking about an issue which is I know very close to his heart having been brought up also on the other side of the Mediterranean where I was brought up which is Rome in my case and his case Beirut and to talk about some recent work that he has been doing on the cities of the Mediterranean. So could you welcome Hashim Sarkis? Good afternoon. In the paper in the journal that you have, I asked the question about what is it about Istanbul that makes it so attractive for subjects of former empires like myself coming from Beirut. Today I would like to ask it from the more professional point of view. What is it that attracts us as architects and planners to this place? What is it about Istanbul's urban geography that makes it relevant to contemporary urban studies at the onset of what we're here for, at the onset of the urban age? I contend that it has to do to a great extent with the way our disciplines and professions venerate the Mediterranean city as an urban ideal and the way we regard Istanbul as one of the clearest realizations of this ideal. Importantly, this ideal, I also want to argue, underlies our conception of the good global city if there is such a good. On the surface the Mediterranean as a cultural entity is full of ideological minds. As anthropologist Michael Hertzfeld has convincingly argued, Mediterraneanism tends to cast infinite stereotypes on the lands and the peoples that surround it. But those who live around the Mediterranean also use it to describe themselves, so we should take it seriously. In parallel, I propose that the Mediterranean city as a concept should be studied in terms of what we see as stereotypes of Mediterranean culture and attitudes, but also because it captures certain desires that we as architects and planners project when we say a Mediterranean city. I'm here confining myself to the formal desires and bracketing, if at all possible, the sensual desires of sea, sex and sun to borrow from Serge Gensboul's famous alliteration that have in some ways found their spatial manifestation in the all too dominant club med phenomenon that has basically overwhelmed much of this country, particularly its gated communities. I'm thinking of areas like Khmer country that really speak of this sensual desire of sea, sex and sun even though it is Mediterranean by way of Florida. Now these are images of the kind of Mediterranean city that we all have in mind when we say Mediterranean city or Istanbul as a Mediterranean city. But in a way after the grey weather of the past week, you may rightly ask what club med, what Mediterranean weather. There are different Mediterranean to be sure. There is the East Mediterranean versus the West Mediterranean. There is the North versus South. Then there are sub Mediterranean like the Adriatic and the Aegean. And then there are paramediteranians like Marmara and the Black Sea. Each of these subcultures aspires to a set of qualities that could distinguish it from the general stereotype without necessarily helping clarify what the general Mediterranean stereotype is actually. Now these geographic variations and subcategories notwithstanding, there are also different historiographic conceptions of the Mediterranean. Meaning ways in which this common basin has been understood to affect the evolution of its shores. Each of these conceptions implies a distinct understanding of the character of the Mediterranean city as a historic entity and as an ideal. Therefore, in my presentation today, I will focus on four sub conceptions of the Mediterranean. First, the Mediterranean as a unifying geography over time. The second is the Mediterranean as a culture, sorry, as a cluster of complementary micro regions. Third, the Mediterranean as opposite but interactive shores. And fourth, the Mediterranean as an endangered ecology. I apologize, this is not my real voice. My real voice is much, much better but I left it on the plane somewhere between Boston and here. Let me start then with the very first one. The Mediterranean as a unifying geography over time. In Fernand Brodell's history of the Mediterranean during the reign of Philip II and his subsequent studies on the Mediterranean, the complex web of diverse cultures and frequent exchanges is nevertheless given structure and long-term continuity by the Mediterranean geography that unifies it. In his long durée, geography is a form giver to the city. Now, how does this translate into the ideal of the Mediterranean city? When I think of the individual Brodell once wrote, I'm always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before. Perhaps the best representation of the Mediterranean city in this vein along these lines as the meandering coastline with harbours framed by mountains and an encroaching hinterland is captured in Istanbul's panoramic order. Istanbul's panorama captured this geographic constant and historic epochs displayed however synchronically on the same plane and it captures also what is constant and what is varied and it organizes them in a very clear structure of a foreground that is always changing, a middle ground that is fixed and the background that is changing as well. Now, does Istanbul, one may ask, live up to this panoramic ideal? The freezing of the Bosphorus skyline by the all-too-powerful Istanbul Historic Commission, is there anyone here from them? No. I can keep going. By the all-too-powerful Istanbul Historic Commission may have on the surface superficially protected this long durée and allowed for this condition of extended visibility to be preserved but it has also severed the constantly revised foreground of the Bosphorus and ever-looming background of Levent from the history of the city. It would be important to rethink the panoramic order of Istanbul as one that is capable of embracing the present and future of the city as well. Second, the Mediterranean as a cluster of complementary microregions. This conception is perhaps best captured in the work of Horden and Purcell on the Mediterranean. In their work, the Mediterranean is explained as a series of microregions that interact with each other frequently in order to complement each other's resources. This microregions mentality or approach to the Mediterranean also provides a very strong connection to the countryside. Historians and sociologists working in this tradition always remind us that culture and agriculture are continuous and they challenge the hegemony of the urban in our understanding of the Mediterranean. This clustering of micro communities is also perhaps best represented by a sketch by a young Le Corbusier. His rendition of Istanbul visited 1914. This rendition of Istanbul was allegedly the inspiration behind the separation of land uses in the modern urbanism. A clear land use subdivision and daily migrations in a landscape that displayed a natural connection between its different parts. The modernist city that it has inspired by this image has since abstracted its land uses and the land use order and separated them from the land underneath. But Istanbul has also abandoned the idea of complementarity among its parts, clearing the inner city of industry and agriculture and shifting towards its self-similarity that is in many ways quite alarming. This conception of the Mediterranean city is further bolstered by images of informality and frequent exchanges that generate the Mediterranean pulse as Henri Lefevre has talked about it. This pulse is in turn best illustrated in the contrast between the frequency of shop fronts in the disappearing bazaar versus those of the incoming shopping mall. But here we also forget one other thing which I think is very enlightening when we look at Istanbul. We often find three or four shops in the Istanbul bazaar owned by the same person or by a family feigning competition and that these bazaar products are also to be found in the formal economy of the shopping mall. Perhaps then we can suggest that this pulse of the city, this Mediterranean pulse, need not be contradictory with the formal economies of global cities. We should also ask whether the city that had been able to accept hinterland through the creation of informal settlements and to ultimately absorb them into its cosmopolitan fabric is now able to do so with its global hinterland. If I can borrow from Saskia Sassan's comments this morning and with the Gypsies and the Eastern Europeans and Africans. The example of Kasim Pasha obviously comes to mind. Thirdly, the idea of the Mediterranean city emerging out of the Mediterranean as opposite but interactive short. The historian, David Abulafia, has argued that what characterizes the Mediterranean the most is a geography of opposed but accessible short with a frequency of exchange between them. In this conception, the edges of the Mediterranean consist of cities and towns that are loosely connected with their hinterland but that are mostly connected with each other via trading communities and businesses. If we compare this with a second conception, here we are talking about cities whereas in the second one it was towns and small clusters and here these towns or big cities have very little interest in the hinterland. They turn their back to it and they're open more to the shores of the other side. Now the opposing shorelines should and could be taken at different scales in the case of Istanbul. There are the two sides of the Bosphorus. Remember that there are international waters that run through it. There's also the Marmara Sea and then the larger Mediterranean and Black Seas. The organization of the spaces and the population of this type of Mediterranean city has already been explained earlier this afternoon by Richard Sennett's use of the concept of the hinge city so I will not talk about it much. But I would like to say that the extent to which Istanbul can continue to make manifest the presence of its trading others in its urban fabric is no doubt threatened by the fact that the heterogeneity of its urban development is no longer connected to the heterogeneity of its ethnic composition but rather to the state development culture that is seeking to create market diversities. Let me repeat that because the Moeddin is not letting me speak. The extent to which Istanbul can continue to make manifest the presence of its trading others in its own fabric is no doubt threatened by the fact that the heterogeneity of its urban development is not connected anymore to the heterogeneity of its ethnic composition but rather to the real estate development culture that is seeking to create market diversity. It is a constructed heterogeneity. The presence of the other that is so celebrated in the hinge city and in Brodell is also threatened here by the nervousness exhibited by nationalist attitudes towards foreign architects and foreign developers. Lastly, the Mediterranean as an endangered ecology. Here, the Mediterranean of ecologists and ecological historians like J.R. McLean insist that Brodell's long-duration geography has also a history, a rapidly changing history. Climate and the terrain change, sorry, climate and the terrain change and they change fast and the history and the special qualities of the Mediterranean region are strongly affected by these changes. Historically, this city has often confronted disasters from fires to earthquakes that have changed its countenance. As historian Guru Neshi Boglu has illustrated, the shifts in the construction of the city from wood to stone and then to a combination of the two, the bringing in of foreign experts during times of crisis, the creation of public spaces and clearings are all historical manifestations of the city's vulnerability but also of its resilience. Today's discussion around climate change amplify the historical confrontation with disaster while also exposing the degree to which the problem cannot be addressed locally or nationally anymore. As Ulrich Peck has argued, the risks we confront today have shown that the national scale cannot deal with them anymore. The visibility of the Mediterranean as a semi-autonomous ecology becomes necessary for action. As the city reaches its limits of growth towards the Black Sea forests and towards the Marmara coastline, it is important for it to articulate these limits not simply as frontiers to eventually be conquered but as definitive edges of ecological commons to be highlighted and to be protected. These four models of the Mediterranean city are compatible with each other. For example, the relationship with the hinterland in the second model and third, conceptions are almost opposed, 180 degrees apart from each other, diametrically opposed. In historiographic terms, one may have to choose among the different models but the beauty of working with spatial models, the way we do, is that they are not mutually exclusive. After all, spatial simultaneity of opposing models may turn out to be a distinctly and desirably Mediterranean trait. In summary then, let me list those traits. The unfolding organization of the panorama that unifies the city with its geography but allows it to evolve, the frequent exchange among clusters of towns, the loose connection to the hinterland which nevertheless produces a distinct pulse in the life to the city that connects to the presence of the hinterland in the city and the city's embrace of a common fate that connects it with other cities bound to it by an endangered ecology. These constitute the qualities of the Mediterranean city which also describe its resilience and persistence as a model or as a series of models. If we close our eyes and look carefully, this is what you see when you close your eyes, at what we find best in the cities of the urban age, the cities that have been studied so far in New York, London, Johannesburg, Monbe, Mexico or Sao Paulo, we can no doubt find many of these qualities. Perhaps we can also begin to discern the emergence of a global Mediterranean. Thank you very much. Hashim, thank you very much for giving us that insight for an incredibly well researched historical region also formal context to the city. He warned me that his voice would run out after 14 and a half minutes and it did. So, you've done very well, so thank you for doing that.