 Our next speaker is Professor Çağlar Kader from the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Bozici University, who is going to talk about Istanbul in the context between local and global. Thank you very much, Professor German. I would like to say, though, that nobody seems to listen to the prime minister in terms of fertility behavior, so don't worry. I think the speakers in this session have already talked about the globalization of Istanbul, especially Saskia Sassen gave us many indications and many indexes, and if we can agree on any definition of global city success, it's fairly clear and apparent that Istanbul is on its way. My argument is that this has really happened in the last decade and since 2002, really. This 2001 was a big crisis year. 500,000 jobs were lost in Istanbul alone. But since then, much has been done that is clearly visible, and not only in those spaces which are made up for exhibit for tourists, but almost everywhere in the city. There are capital flows and people flows and huge increase in tourism. There are new neighborhoods that seem to be fairly cosmopolitan artist neighborhoods. And as we heard this morning, there are even attempts to institute some kind of a financial center in Istanbul or making Istanbul a financial hub. So it is in fact quite credible that Istanbul may evolve to anchor the European peninsula from the eastern side sort of an equivalent role that London plays on the west. Now, all this of course has to do with what goes on in the global economy. Obviously, in a crisis period, if the global economy really collapses after this financial debacle, that will not happen. But as much as we can count on some revival, some recovery, global capital will be looking for venues and Istanbul does have advantages. It's geographical location, it's vibrant hinterland, it's links with the eastern countries, links with the Turkish diaspora in Europe. The fact that Middle East capital seems to have found its way into Istanbul. But as always the case, this is only an opportunity. The question is whether or not this opportunity will be seized, whether or not there is local politics, local culture, local admission of these opportunities. Now, ten years ago, in 1999, I and some colleagues who some of them are here in this audience prepared a book, a collection of articles on the global and local in Istanbul. And there, now retrospectively speaking, the local was quite concrete in the sense that there was a very palpable sense that old spaces were being defended, that there was real serious resistance. And of course, this wasn't simply a question of defending old spaces in the sense of built environment, but also the rich history, not only of the city itself, but the history of the context that was found in. The political context, the fact that it was in a particular kind of nation state, the fact that in this particular kind of nation state, the state had different kinds of concerns than making the city into a global one. There were all kinds of histories of institutions, of population, of culture, which seemed to interfere with this kind of prospect of globalization. And all of these constituted potential resistance. So the ten years ago, when we could look at Istanbul, it seemed to us that the contest was still ongoing and it wasn't clear how it would end, how it would resolve. Outcomes were not at all certain. All the solutions with respect to globalization seemed to be temporary and provisional. Resistance was concrete. However, there was globalization that was taking place, but it was taking place in a way in which shanty town development in Istanbul also did. Locating itself in places where there was least resistance, where the rules did not really impede, but they did not permit either. So there was a globalization which could be called an informal globalization in the sense that it was proceeding without proper rules, without the kind of assurance and without the kind of infrastructure that a more proper globalization now can be witnessed. So this weight of the old, as I said, could be seen as a multi-dimensional thing. It could be seen in the reluctance of the bureaucracy, for instance, who had to ratify some of these decisions in Ankara. It was also seen in the difficulty of establishing property rights. It was seen in the difficulty and the uncertainty at the governmental level. For instance, the 2001 crisis is widely seen to have been triggered by a quarrel between the president and the prime minister at the time. The inability to conclude a deal because of obscure legal impediments. These were still there. So these were the weight of the old. What I want to argue now is that there has been significant change since then in terms of dealing with the old. And we can talk about this under two headings. The first one is political change. This was alluded to by the ambassador. The old tension, which had always been a feature of Turkish history. The tension between Ankara and Istanbul, I think, has been finally resolved. And this of course has to do with AKP coming to power after 2002. And it has a lot to do with, as was mentioned, the fact that the prime minister now was in fact the former mayor of Istanbul. So in a way, the former mayor of Istanbul, who announced in 1994 when he was first elected, that he was going to want to transform Istanbul in a relatively, although it wasn't pronounced, in a neoliberal way. He wanted to make sure that Istanbul would remain a middle class city. He wanted to stop immigration. All these, of course, are carried on into his prime ministry. And the fact that he is the prime minister, of course, means that he still has a hands on attitude towards Istanbul. So the old tension, the old separation between the city of empires and the new nationalist pure capital city in the steppes is no longer there. Now what this suggests, of course, is that in terms of what the businessman, the bourgeoisie of Istanbul, the urban patriciate of Istanbul does, they no longer have the option of saying that we are going to opt out and deal with the Ankara bureaucrats as opposed to the Istanbul mayor. They now have to get in line, fall in line with the single political poll that now exists. Now this means, of course, that in terms of the ability of the urban patriciate of Istanbul, the urban elite of Istanbul bourgeoisie, their ability to form the kind of urban coalition, urban growth coalition that is very much written about in the literature, to in fact come up with unified projects, to come up with projects that they can all stand behind and about which they can negotiate with the political, administrative, local government and central government. This has become possible. So in that sense, the coherence of the urban coalition is a new feature. This means that there can be urban entrepreneurialism, it means that there can be boosting of the city, there can be positioning of the city, marketing of the city, there can be all kinds of public private ventures which were not the case before. And in fact, the profusion of private public ventures such as all the museums that now you see in Istanbul is really quite amazing and it all happened over the last decade or so or even less. Now, the urban coalitions that exist, of course, want to attract capital and the fact is that over the last five, six years the global capital that could be attracted and that has been attracted has mostly been financial. And this was of course a feature of the current crisis as well, that this financial capital which inevitably went into speculation and which inevitably resulted in a bubble led to the current crisis that we are all aware of. Now, in Istanbul, the appearance that disturbed the manifestation of the speculative dynamic was real estate. In other words, the incredible expansion of the city geographically but also in terms of new buildings, new developments, gated communities and all kinds of office buildings, etc. is hugely apparent. It is an expansion that is not only outward for expansion of the area under habitation but also inward in terms of all kinds of building and gentrification that goes on. Now, this leads me to the second heading because this sort of speculation in land, speculation in the built environment cannot really happen unless there is very proper legal infrastructure for property. Now, here again there is a huge novelty. This is of course a big topic because the property structure, the legal infrastructure of property ownership that Istanbul has had over thousands of years is very much imbued with its imperial history both in the older empires but mostly in the Ottoman Empire. The land regime of course was very different than what we usually talk about in the case of European land regimes or Anglo-Saxon, I mean also American. The land and buildings that were left behind by the departing population from the empire also was a factor. In other words, the Greeks and the Armenians who left land, in fact the mayor of Beyoğlu was speaking about a neighborhood which has this problem of uncertain ownership because of the fact that most of those buildings were owned by the departing Greek population. So the kind of Ottoman background to the land regime plus the fact that the population exchange and population departure, population deportation has been a very significant part of Istanbul's history. That meant that Istanbul inherited this very ambivalent land situation in terms of property. The fact that the shanty towns, the gecekondos, were built basically through occupation of public land and squatting also added to the situation. Now what this suggests is given this ambivalent land situation it would have been quite difficult if not impossible for the sprawl, the expansion, the area in terms of which the new building is occurring around Istanbul and also gentrification inside for instance Beyoğlu could not have happened. Now this has been solved over the last five years. This has been solved in many different ways but the main thing is the mass housing administration, Toki, that we heard about and the fact that Toki has been given incredible powers by the central government to privatize public land to take over ambivalent status land inside the city to raise old gecekondos and to come up with a new basically land regime. So this has happened through many legislations, urban renovation, protection of cultural heritage, the earthquake, legislation, etc. Now Toki's final product out of this is basically a new modern housing policy as opposed to the kind of makeshift housing policy that was built on the ambivalent land regime. Now this clearing of the city and opening up of the new land through privatization of public land and transforming all the ambiguous claims to former ones has meant that the city is finally ready for this kind of property expansion. Land has been commodified finally and there is now a much more coherent space. So in terms of defenders of old spaces to fall back on, not much is left. Politically there isn't much and legally in terms of legislation that belonged to the old populist era, nothing has been left. This is becoming a truly capitalist city in that sense. So of course capitalists have their problems and these have to do with social spatial polarization. They are subject to global crises as we just saw. But this means that the old kind of struggles, the old kind of resistance is no longer valid, is no longer useful. There has to be new ways of thinking about this resistance. There has to be new kinds of politics. We have to admit that we live in a different world. Thank you.