 Thank you. I want to start with a question first, just to let it hang over in your minds during my presentation. What is the architect's position in urban scale, or what it should be? This is a graphic depicting the number of transistors scientists can fit into a chip in advancing years. It's nothing related to urban or architectural graphics. But this graph is also known as the picture of Moore's law. The capacity... This is also a similar graph again, showing the capacity of hard disks increasing by years. And every year it is doubled. As you can see within each period, the capacity doubles, but it is affordable still. And this is a graph showing the world population increase. The red line shows the population living in urban areas, whereas the green shows the rural population. As you can see, Moore's law can also be seen here as a pattern. And this is the population growth of Istanbul, which shows a similar accelerating trend after the mid-70s. But hopefully it's going to be decreasing after 2010. Keeping in mind the law of Moore's law, I'll jump to the architectural scene now. These are two screenshots from my Google Reader page, showing only the posts that are retrieved from a single architectural block on the last two days. The publications feeding us with images of new architectural production from all over the world increased by numbers. And consequently, we realize that there is enormous production of architectural... enormous production in the architectural scene. The images shown here are from recent finished buildings in various places around the world. About 120 images are served to be by a single architectural publication in one single day. Actually what I am trying to say is that architectural production shows a similar trend to Moore's law. It has surpassed our capacity to perceive, to think deeply about it, and to understand the architectural knowledge by looking at the buildings produced. Last century, we had been busy to talk often on a few buildings, which many books and articles have been written upon. But today, the pace of architectural production is much more than its perception in a critical sense. It's becoming harder and harder to write an architectural history of today's century because it will take longer for all the production to precipitate. Architectural profession changed little since the beginning of the previous century. When William Morris was designing the Red House, garden cities were being built. When the corbusiers are designed and built by Ron Shumchefeld, he was also designing the Plain Boysen. Unfortunately, it was not realized. Today, similar attitudes are being carried by current architects, extending their reach from product sales. Architects are now not only work to rehabilitate the existing areas of the cities, but they are also hired to create new cities, even in desserts. Given that condition, how should the new generation of architects deal with the urban problems? I claim that as architects, we don't yet understand what the cities are demanding from us. Let me show you this statement by a couple of images that I took from Istanbul streets. This is a café in one of the most prestigious neighborhoods of Istanbul, Teşvikye. And this is a similar human behavior, improvisation, this time at Tarla Başa. This is Karaköy Perşembe Pazar District, where there are hardware stores located. And this is the night scene. All of those boxes that you see in the walls are actually shops and real people, which have families and children, earn their lives from these boxes. This is a mobile tea house selling tea and soda, which is located one of the busiest ferry terminals in Istanbul and very close to the Beşiktaş. And this is the true store, as you may call it. And near to that area, you can see similar shops which use the streets as shop windows or even the buildings itself, as similar used in the other district. And this is the picture which shows an open neighborhood market in Istanbul, which is set up only for one day. And only for one day in a single week. And a similar one in the other side of Istanbul. And we look at these pictures and we saw that clearly those people do not need architects because they are solving their own problems. And they can survive quietly without us. Let me show you what happens when we intervene in a shopping process like here. I want to make a striking comparison on how well an organically growing and not specifically designed stores better than a space that is totally designed in the finest details. This is a covered bazaar. It's built in the 15th century and it has more than 3,600 shops located in 45,000 square meters area. And each day between 250,000 and 400,000 daily visitors are visiting this building. And this is the J.Y. shopping mall in Şişli. They are both in the same scale with two images. And it's built in 2000. Only it has 343 shops and occupy 350,000 square meters covered floor area in 62,000 square meters plot. And estimated daily visitors are 50,000 to 150,000 a day. So the numbers are striking. And this is the interior of the covered bazaar and this is the interior of the J.Y. shopping mall. Almost the number of the people in these two different shops are the same. As architects, we are more oriented towards designing the end-finished product, imagining that the scenario in our minds will work out. However, we are never interested in designing the overall process of a place in this whole life cycle. Sometimes Danyas designed informal spaces are the best working ones. When Richard Birder told us before the Urban Age conference six months ago or something like that, he wanted architectural teams for the Urban Age Istanbul's conference. And as an architecture center, we had selected five young officers, which are A.T.A.R.T., D.A.B. architecture, P.A.B., SO, and SuperPool. What we did is actually a bit different than a usual workshop. We didn't address any problem for the teams to work on. The brief was very vague and they had to choose what they think is important in Istanbul to be solved primarily. No site, no location, no problem was defined. All the teams had to come up with their own problematic issues and they had to choose a site to demonstrate that issue and they had to suggest a solution for that which will also have grounds to be realized. At the first phase, the teams spent quite amount of time since they don't have a client for the brief as they used to. They had to be their own clients, which was a process which we as architects are never used to be. All the teams came up with different ideas, problems and sites, but there is a common binding trade for all of the studies that we have done here and let me explain it with a metaphor. This is a scene from Apollo 13 movie where the engineers down in Houston had to solve a mechanical ventilation problem which occurred in the Apollo 13 above which threatens the lives of the astronauts. Their time was limited and they had to come up with the creative solution to invent a basic mechanical device to provide fresh air again to astronauts. They are only allowed to create the solution with the equipment and materials that are existing inside Apollo 13 above and they created this device and it described how to create it again in the Apollo above and this is the astronaut which created the same solution of Apollo 13. This is a striking example of creativity in problem solving and I think it can be applied to urban issues and what we did together with the five teams was similar to that process and I am using the metaphor for reverse engineering of the method that we used actually. We did carefully analysed how the city is working in different parts and we saw that some parts of the cities are functioning quite well and some are failing and the things that we learned from the working parts led us to the solutions for failing parts and I would like to explain in more detail of these valuable solutions but since time is limited I have to choose only three of them and I apologise for the rest of the two teams. This is a project by Eitart and it's called Reclaiming Values. Istanbul's most unique feature as we might already have witnessed that is topography and it may seem fantastic from some point of view but there are other places that it creates problems and especially at the Valle basins. A few months ago after we finished this special study with the teams an enormous flood just struck Istanbul and Eitart chose to work on how to reclaim the values occupied by legal or illegal settlements since they are natural ecological corridors which bring breezes and fresh air to the city and the city is well and they also prevent the flooding by carrying the rainwater down to the sea. Eitart decided to copy the Henry Frost rule which worked quite well in the historic peninsula and it kept a distinct skyline until today and adapted this rule to be applied to the valleys and this is a different approach than the existing valid building cost since it takes the topographical features the altitude from the base of the valley as a criteria rather than the distance to the riverbed on the horizontal map scale and this was the solution they came up with by clearing away the buildings above the 40 meters level of the valley basin and relocating them on the borders of the valley they can come up by freeing up the valley by green areas and also inserting some super social structures in order to host some public functions another project was led by the team SO and it's called Naturban or Nature Plus Urban this is one of the most actually used cost parks in Istanbul and SO decided to look at why and how some public spaces are working and if this could be turned into a working tool for other places and they try to think about the Sultanbeyli area in the illegal settlement which is on the border of the northern forests and keeping up the northern forests as it is I mean is a very big issue an debated issue and still we couldn't find a solution to keep those forests by pure legal prevention even though the forest and sea has different spatial and physical characteristics both creates a borderline to the settlements however the cost becomes a living place whereas forests seem as something as a barrier for the development it's almost becoming impossible to prevent the northern forests by legal terms as I said before those become inadequate and rarely offenders are punished and since the city grows by eating up these forests and these illegal settlements are eventually legalized in each election process this is the project site so choose to work on in Sultanbeyli area and this is the schematic version of a section of the project by integrating nature with the urban tissue so claim that hopefully those people living on those illegal settlements will preserve the forests by themselves by owning them and so design the repetitive model which can be applied along the borderline of the forests and this is the last project I would like to mention and it's made by Superfool Superfool decided to think about relationship between the cars and the open-street spaces and when we talk about the traffic problems in the cities we always think about the moving traffic but actually the static traffic or the parked cars on the street levels is a crucial problem as well each day 400 new cars are getting into the city and the nearest these are invaded by the cars and Superfool looked at that actually the street level of Istanbul is actually very active the public activities are occurring in the streets by informally and the cars which invade these are actually preventing these public activities to happen and so they decided to make parking structures within 5 minutes walking distances in neighborhoods and which will also cover the whole parking areas and eventually those parking spaces become the parking spaces will also collect all those buildings and cars and those cars will also lead to the streets to be free from the cars and those parking structures are also going to be used as some public functions they will host some public functions and for the last minute I would like to put some magnifying glass on ourselves and make a self-criticism and how can we these projects can be implemented and realized we as intellectual people, sociologists, architects, planners all of us are trying to solve the social and physical and economical problems of the streets by using our collective knowledge we analyze, examine, survey, produce numbers, graphs and sometimes even test our ideas we are trying to fix the conflicts, contradictions that are embedded in each city which makes the lives of its citizens harder even though we don't have an ideal city image in our mind we still know that something should be changed in order to enhance the human life in cities however we have to admit that we are allured with these images of these conflicts contradictions and extremes of the cities these are all enchanting images we praise diversity, heterogeneity instead of homogeneity and banality on the other hand we rarely know the way to enhance the physical conditions by keeping the inherent contradictions of these cities which make them vibrant this is a very insidious threat in the interest of intellectuals on urban conditions the knowledge we have and the new information we produce through our intellectual and academic studies cannot penetrate into the real administrative life of the cities we still cannot communicate enough with the governing bodies, municipalities and developers which we shape our cities thus our analysis rarely grasped by the right people in the administrative positions our solutions or suggestions very rarely become realized mostly they rest as shelves we still couldn't create a successful interface to transfer our knowledge to those in administrations besides the inherent base of metabolic rate of cities is much faster than our reactions and much wider than our visions thus we as intellectual people working on the architecture of urban conditions we are mostly becoming behind and thus find ourselves in a reactionary position rather than a forecasting position however the increasing interest on urbanism in various intellectual circles creates its popular culture as well which doubles the threat I am mentioning about the whole real life problems of the cities and most important problem of the people living in those cities may become a kind of a spectacle which is decreased into the architecture of the kingdom surveys, numbers or images we have to think more precisely carefully about the consequences of our intellectual interest on urban issues since the actual issue may easily become a spectacle reducing it down to an exotic realm which is very dangerous I think the exotification of problems into two dimensional images or graphics and I think that's what we should as intellectuals avoid thank you