 I also think there was an interesting flow there from your definition Hashim of how cities are very much shaped by their geographies at many levels. And your point is about the intense relationship between regulation or lack of and the spatial structure of the city which you've then analyzed. Now we move together to the discussion in doing that we have five extremely distinguished speakers who know an enormous amount not only about the distribution of cultures and cities at an international level because of the background they have but also in some cases a deep knowledge of the city itself. So I'm going to start by asking Sophie Baudi-Gendro who is a sociologist who's worked very closely with the urban age since its inception, director of the Center for Urban Studies at Assault Bonne to start with her contribution and I will be tight on time with everybody so that we can have a brief discussion later on. Thank you. Thank you, Ricky. The scope of the topic defines in itself its limitation. There are indeed many cities in the world the evolution of which does not require any confrontation with the past and out of mere charity I will not enumerate their names. Obviously this is not the case of Istanbul. The position I would like to define here is based on the term confronting in the title of this communication and it is indeed my assumption that we are mystified by a past that contemporary observers tend to embellish by comparison with the difficulties of the present and the uncertainties of the future. I do not think that this position is legitimate. The past is full of queries and of negative accounts but obviously literature is among the guilty actors. Here I'm sure in this room everybody has in mind invisible cities by Italo Calvino and in the book Marco Polo's cities are elusive yet everywhere. All cities are one and no one city contains them all. In its stories, the musings, the cities are problematized and its dizzying possibilities are explored but there is not just literature there is history. History tends to magnify the lives of the powerful few and to provide the nation states as the natural successors of empires and obviously we know better now and we know that in the past life was harsh and full of spoilations and wars and lifespan was small. I'm not going to develop this. I would like to ask three questions. What is transmitted? How is the screening process operating? Can the ephemeral the transient dig in and what can be done to give residents a sense of belonging and of care for the city? What is transmitting? I just learned that at the French National Library there are four million volumes that have never been required by anybody and I wonder if Google is going to register them or not. The elites want to decide for the better and we have in mind Baron Osman who at a certain moment erased chunks of the city for better health, for trade. With the emperor he had the body politics in mind but the subtext was that he wanted the gun machines to get in better in the city if we voted working class neighborhoods were going to erupt. We also know about China that many historical neighborhoods are erased for a better future for the masses. Obviously there are unlined minds among architects, urban planners and designers who try both to keep in the past and offer a more adjusted present, taking in the requirements of our time. Second question, can the ephemeral the transient dig in and here I see two obstacles, the jobs. It's Paul Verilio that says that we are obsessed with speed at our time and it's true that many people follow the jobs where they are, they may not necessarily remain in the city. Secondly as we just heard from the previous presentation, people who settle in may not sure that they will become legitimate owners of their plot, they will be threatened not only by poor newcomers but also by the rich and maybe the state. So we may have done an explanation about the feeling of insecurity in the city. We know that three residents out of four are afraid of mugging, are afraid of assault and I wonder if they know their neighbors. I wonder if they know who their neighbors are, there are also threats of terrorism present in every global city and this city is not spared. So what can be done? How can we give people a sense of belonging and of care about the city where they are? Paul Valérie used to say that if the state is too strong it oppresses us but if it is too weak we perish. There is obviously a middle road to find. We have the Greeks in mind, they provided forums and agoras where the citizens could engage in a conversation and also see the workings of the government and get a sort of sense of decision making. I think that explaining decisions is just as important as making decisions for the citizens. It is likely that if democratic practices are enforced, collective life and differences may mutually coexist. If citizens are caught in a collective engagement, we have then the foundation for political citizenship and for future rights. Then residents will inhabit the city, appropriate its collective memory, then the city will act as a promise, a link, a place where something happens. Thank you. To Aisha Andrzej. Yes. So Aisha, please. Aisha Andrzej, yes. Since I have a very limited amount of time, rather than make my own statements, I am going to address a few questions to the topic of confronting history, which is in the title of this session, and perhaps raise a few questions about the talks themselves. Now I enjoyed Hashim Sarkis' talk, but I also enjoyed reading his piece, which was in, which is printed in the newspaper, and which is titled, It's an Istanbul, Not Globalization. In his talk, he emphasized the geographical location of Istanbul, the notion of hinge cities to some extent, or parallels between Mediterranean cities, and the ways of thinking about them. In his written piece, he focused on, or foregrounded, Istanbul's imperial past, which I find more intriguing, frankly, and it is global cities, imperial pasts multiple, is a topic that's never discussed, as far as I can tell. So what then are the kinds of issues he brings up? What does, how is this imperial past relevant for today? I can at least think of three different ways, which are indirectly, sometimes, and sometimes directly mentioned in the piece itself. There is, on the one hand, his references to his own autobiography in the piece, which raises questions about the trauma of ethnic clansings, which accompanied the dissolution of Ottoman Empire and the rise of Ankara as the emblematic of Turkey's modernity as a nation state. So in this sense, it reminds us of the ways in which history is implicated in the present through traumatic events, ethnic clansings, et cetera, in a lot of 20th century nationalisms, let us say, if not too broadly. So in all cities which have been transformed through 20th century nationalisms, such traumas are perhaps, such traumas can be talked about perhaps, but I think stumble is ranks among the first in terms of the ethnic clansings that accompanied this process. Now, also, of course, his piece draws attention to a different, also to a different way in which the past is somehow implicated in the present. And that is, of course, the ways in which the history of cities is marketed in transnational markets today. This is common to most cities, and however ambiguous it may be, most cities market their legendary history and market themselves as city of culture. So certainly, Stumble's marketing of its 2,000 years of history in transnational markets is a very significant way in which history is implicated in the present. The broader parameters of the transformation of Stumble's history into commercial revenues is once again familiar, and a number of people talked about it in their articles, a series of urban restoration projects supported by coalitions of government, and corporate run interests have obliterated from memory some of the most densely populated areas of the city in the very recent past. This is a process that is going on at the present as well. But each of these opens up a whole Pandora's box of different kinds of questions, of course, to make it short. But I think that Sarkis's piece, that's the written piece, also conjures in my mind different historical narratives of the Ottoman past. These are not official, unofficial narratives at the moment, but Stumble's imperial past is currently a site of political struggle in the present. This imperial, what, which of the multiple layers of this imperial past represents the future of the city is a site of political struggle. And the piece by Sarkis, intriguing as it is, because it raises the question of how imperial Stumble's linkages with the Middle East and its neighboring countries are being revitalized now. It also, I think, presents a vision of Stumble's future that is very much that of Akbar. Could I ask maybe Hashim to address this now very briefly? Can I continue? Two more sentences. Because it's a vision that reaches back to 17th century Stumble, to the tolerance of Islam towards Christians and Jews. So it is a vision of a multicultural Stumble that is a buzzword, obviously, but one that progressively erases from the fabric of the city all signs of its 19th century Bel-Apoc multiculturalism. So sorry to be directing, addressing your piece, but I think that it brings up a host of issues about the ways Stumble's history haunts the present, if you like the term. And I think that we should think about the ways in which the history of Paris, the colonial history of Paris haunts Paris or Berlin or London. Come back. Can you both turn off your microphones? So Hashim, very briefly, you respond. Thank you for a very generous and thorough reading of my piece. I wanted to respond maybe with several unrelated comments. First, both the idea of the empire or empire capital and the idea of the Mediterranean city are antithetical to what we understand to be the logic and order of the nation state. That my interest in both has a lot to do with at least what I see as a positive move in the advent of the global age or global city and the urban age, is that we are now looking for other models to describe both the future but also the past of this urban age. And that cannot be confined to the logic of the nation state. And so the Mediterranean city is very logic in terms of its connection to networks, its sort of ambivalent relation to the hinterland is yet another confirmation of the history of an empire in its relation to its territory. The Ottoman Empire has exercised over 500 years of its control of the region. Very different strategies, particularly with the Middle East. Initially it could probably be best described as a kind of plasticity that someone like Roberto Mangabera Unger has written in terms of relation between plasticity and power. But that later on it became much more of a visual symbolic militaristic presence, particularly after the disappearance of control over the Balkans and the European side. It's interesting to see that the project of modernization that took place in the 19th and early 20th century between Istanbul and the rest of the Arab world was more of a let's modernize together. And there was even a kind of rivalry between Istanbul and Cairo that started after the Napoleonic invasion, which could be an interesting model also to think about today in relation to the kind of power relationships between these regional global centers and the rest of the region. That could be a fascinating thing to look at. But I also want to point out that both in terms of its connection to the Mediterranean and its connection to the empire, Istanbul has maintained long periods of ambivalence towards that the relation with the Middle East today is more about an aftermath of having achieved a particular position that it's using the Middle East to kind of strategize globally. And I think historically we can say the same has happened. Well, in your essay you mentioned Dubai Tower. So maybe it's the Middle Eastern capital now coming into Istanbul. This is one of the powerful images now, isn't it, of this new connection. And also maybe the Panorama Museum, which celebrates the conquering of Istanbul, Constantinople. Again, it's the imperial past coming back to Istanbul, but in a very ideological way. So I'd like to give word to now Murat Belge, who has written a lot about these issues. I'm not an urbanist or an architect, although I must confess I also have some architects as my good friends. So I'm interested mainly in the Istanbul that I love. And from the 80s I started on the request of a friend of mine who was running a cultural society at the time to take people around the city and show them. And so this is mainly my experience. Before that I was a sort of lone lover of the city and wandered alone, like a cloud, like Wordsworth. But then I started wandering around with certain people, showing them places, etc. Now I will also want to start with this history question, the confrontation with history. My premise is that I think we Turks have not treated Istanbul properly. That's the way I feel. And the reason for that, my main interpretation to understand why is our relationship with history before our relationship with the city. Via the medium of that relationship we have, what I would call maybe sort of diametrically opposed to basic attitudes towards this city. One started actually with the Republic, but also Turkish nationalism started with the Republic. And all of a sudden all the glorious past of Istanbul etc. did not really conform to the ideals of the nation state as you were saying. So we had to go to the heartland of Anatolia to discover the pure and whatever unspoiled soul of the Turkish nation. And we had to get rid of the Sultanate, first of all, because there was this crisis of legitimation. After 600 years of empire, you're stepping into the Republic and how do you legitimate that? So one method is to say the empire was bad, the Sultanate was bad. You make a parenthesis out of those 600 years and to do that you go to begin your history from Central Asia. And the further east you go into Asia the Istanbul fades more and more. And secondly, as you are punishing the city you are punishing its citizens. And of course foremost to punish are those who are not Turks or Muslims. There were some ambiguities at the time. And so there was real neglect of Istanbul and more or less everything that it represented. When I started as I said in the 80s to take people around, this was during the last real pre-modern military coup that we had because we've been having postmodern ones since. And people in Istanbul were in utter boredom because in sort of this militaristic atmosphere it's made very clear that tomorrow is going to be as dull as today. So we're trying to find forms of entertainment and so I started taking people around. And then I realized that we were making a transition into the second attitude towards Istanbul which is nostalgia. Nostalgia for what we lost because you have nostalgia after you lose and you have no chance of carrying it on. And so it was this multicultural Istanbul that we had the nostalgia about. In Istanbul I can talk of two people, the DNA question, the more cultured as the orange and the red Istanbul. They go around the city, around the main arteries. That's about all they don't know what exists in the next street from the artery. And then there are the blue and dark blue, the Stambos. And those people were living in the areas where I was taking people to show them. The synagogue, the Greek church, the communion church and the abundance of these things because of that past, this is the place you can find the Bulgarian church or a Georgian Catholic church or a Greek Catholic church or an Armenian Protestant church etc. And of course these were all full of surprise for these people. And as you go to where these churches are the children come to you and they start shouting, hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye. So immediately they realize that you're a foreigner and you realize you're a foreigner. So it's in this kind of situation, how can we talk about citizens? Gündüz earlier was talking about leading the city to the citizens. Here we have a strange usage of the word hemcheli which means citizen. One man says hemcheli to another citizen, where are you from? And logically they should be from the same city. But the answer is I'm from Kastamolu and the person who asks the question is from Tunjeli. So this is the kind of citizenship DNA that we have. Thank you Murat. Well, we have another person who walks a lot in the city, another historian Orhan Essen. He is taking tours around Istanbul from a rather different point of view and I wonder what there's a nostalgic kind of tone in this conference from this morning onwards as if Istanbul is at a turning point, as if something is radically shifting in the city. And maybe you picked that up in your travels in the city that for instance you don't take your tours to Sulukule which is now a totally demolished neighborhood which is now the sign of what's coming in the city today. So maybe there is some nostalgia around lurking which we don't put a word onto it. I don't know. Can you allow me to say just one sentence because I made all that talk for the sentence but I forgot the sentence. When I talk about this problematic relationship with history, the two types. One is a history that never existed and the second is another history that also never existed. So we have to put this right. I'd like to draw a statement indeed building up on three that were made before so they will help me. There is a very clear analysis of the spatial DNA and the Ipsos Mori's survey of Istanbul, particularly in the point of security, felt and real insecurity. And this morning is a very political intervention which obviously some of us just spent one day in Istanbul and is capable to proceed but our politicians are possibly not. So we hosted the mayor this morning. I think we just heard the opposite type of a statement. So as a historian dealing with the issues of the built environment, of course the first thing you see is in the city that the city has been fully erased and rebuilt in the previous two centuries. And interestingly in the third century, so I'm talking about the 1920s, in each of these centuries the entire building stock of the city has been totally erased and has been rebuilt. In the 20th, a new building stock hasn't added as Issan has put it. And in the 21st century we are again talking about the urban transformation which can you simply read as a third time total erasure and rebuilding action. So what is it all about that? The first one we can also have already heard the name of Baron Osman so we can talk of the Osmanization of Istanbul even in times before Issan's explanation. So that city that was inherited from the Ottomans has already totally erased and rebuilt the old classical Ottoman city. So that city that was inherited by the Republic is indeed a modernized city and Ottomanized city if you want to take so. And already an earlier form of private property had been introduced to the city so we can, if you just go from a pure use right to the full property in terms of making capitalism on land possible. So there are different grey shades and Istanbul history is kind of just a transition from different shades of the grey so to speak. So the longer 19th century from 1830s to 1920s has been totally erasing that city. And the second process we can speak of, the first one maybe we can bring together with the concept of enlightened despotism in a way and modernizing the city. But the second one that's mainly starts with 1965 laws that enables property in the air as we can see in a rather pragmatic way it just enables for the old Istanbul middle classes to maximize their living space in an utmost period of demographic pressure. But today if you talk of an urban transformation in the 21st century we rather think of two areas. One is the area where Murat walks around. So this is let's say the impoverished geography of Istanbul at the center. Indeed mainly those parts of the 19th century Istanbul which has been rather slightly affected by the modernization of 1965 that had been converted into a slum area. But the second in the slum areas. The second is the areas which again Eastern has put as these informal settlements areas which indeed were very successfully converting themselves after 1985 into something different from a Gececonda city into a post Gececonda city. And today we attach all kinds of negative properties to the city. So when we talk about urban transformation we indeed talk of irresponsible property. So both the inner city slums which are targeted to the new law 5366 or the informal settlement areas which are targeted to different older laws and which will target of a new prepared law of urban transformation in order to prevent disaster risks like earthquake risks. So in both cases the saying is the following. You have an entrusted property but you dealt improperly or irresponsibly with this property. So now it's time that we disappropriate you and just give you say parts of it back in order to just in case you are able to buy it back. This is whatever exactly is happening in Sulukule and it's also happening in many other informal settlement areas. Just at this point the reasons are very multifold for this but I just want to point out to just one of them. I want to compare Sao Paulo's and Istanbul's security situation as we have heard in this survey of urban age. So the real homicide rate in Istanbul is 3 per 100,000 which is one of the worldwide lowest. So just less than half of for instance New York's and at the same time Sao Paulo has 21 per 100,000 people are killed. So obviously Istanbul is 7 times more security than Sao Paulo is. However if you just look at the perceived insecurity in these two cities you will see that Istanbul's by 74% are afraid of being attacked on the street where Sao Paulo's are only by 47%. So there seems to be a very particular issue maybe you can say it's also the package of our history. The perceived insecurity in Istanbul is kind of irrational. There's an irrationality. And one of the major drives of urban transformation is this perceived insecurity. However we know by many other cases the way our urban transformation is going to happen the way it is planned by our mainstream academia, mainstream politicians and the industry we're possibly going to produce a city which will be much more likely to produce real insecurity. Maybe if we have just once produced that city maybe we will feel more secure as we will start as we just begin coping with this real insecurity situation. Thank you. I'd like to give the floor to Pelintan. She's an art historian and she's also doing lots of different kinds of compiling different stories of the city and publishing these different cities from artists, communities and activist communities. Perhaps you could comment. Yeah, may I have my notes? Especially through my experience in the last 15 years I worked a lot with artists especially. I learned several different representation of the city. And this is mainly a different kind of analysis and explanation that often be sociologists, architects or even art historians too. And these practices or these kind of representations by visual artists always come from everyday life practices. I think the city has overlaid spatial practices and it is not easy to describe or generalize the differences, the thresholds, either in urban identity level or in the mean of public space, the mean of share of public space through these kind of representations. And how can we capture differing spatial narratives of different parts? I always try to go to the street life, everyday life, how in the street I myself as an Istanbulan and also as coming from a social science field, how I negotiate on the street of Istanbul. As an inhabitant I live in a gypsy occupied street since last eight years. And my landlady is an Ottoman Greek and the other street, near street is Kurdish community and the back street is Arab community. I have to negotiate everyday when I go out from my door and come back in the evening. But as a negotiation is how we share the street, how we represent or self in the street and what we want and what we don't want. And there is a lot of conflict inside this practice. And I don't want to marginalize here and I don't want to make it as an exotic element. I would say it's a kind of sadomaso practice. This is also a kind of relation, your relation yourself, both as an inhabitant and a social scientist or whatever scientist you are with Istanbul. And this is a potential, I believe, of this conflictual situation, this antagonistic, let's call it like that. It says a potential to analyze a city or to leave different kind of experiences. The last thing I would say, I want to say now, as maybe Orhan Bit mentioned, of course in the last few years we are under pressure of this municipal urban state transformation projects that affects the local communities and their move in the city, their forced move or forced transformation in the city. This is also a kind of problematic condition now what is happening in the city. I still believe this conflictual situation, this antagonistic practice can create a kind of way of to call Istanbul as an open city. I remember, I want to refer your talk, when you talked about Calvino, he had a talk in 1974 in Milan called Kuala Utopia, what kind of utopia? And he was trying to comment on the recent cities and he was, I will try to remember, but he was telling something like, for him open city is a conditioning becoming city, which is open and how communities come together, commune together, having their singular position and they can create the study of multiple cities. You can call it as a romantic way, but it's also a kind of radical way, as all romanticism is radical always. Thank you very much. Well as a way of wrapping up maybe, we've got another 10 minutes or so. I think to pick up on Pellin's point about this romanticism or the utopia, I think Richard Sennett asks in his essay, is Istanbul going to be like Frankfurt or he says, is it little Venice, I think he's suggesting, but maybe Pellin is saying, well this kind of romantic idea, Frankfurt suggesting overly gentrified sterile maybe kind of cleaned up urban spaces. So I think that I'm picking, I want to just bring what was talked in the morning here to this table, that Charles Arcada seemed to be saying, well the story is finished in the sense that now Istanbul is entering a real capitalist city development era. Now the whole success story, which was based on perhaps the informal Mediterranean kind of identity, economy is now finishing, so we are coming to a new paradigm, if you like. But I want to just maybe finish with this question, maybe Isan, I mean is there something in the DNA of the city that will resist? And I'm, Suketur Mehta was making this point of other voices, other narratives. Is there something in the DNA of the city and who are these other narratives? He singled out journalists, but Charles Arcada talked about different resistance narratives. And do you see in the DNA perhaps, or Aisha talked about the imperial past, do you see clues as to make us feel hopeful? And if you could address Sophie's question at the same time. Yeah. A couple of comments and answers. First to Pedin's questions about my ambition to match. I think the representation of space has three components. You've got space as it is perceived, you've got space as it is experienced and you have space as it is conceptualized. And all these aspects are of course interrelated and Henri Lefebvre talked about a triolectics of space. These are all interconnected. I have only and only concentrated on the representational aspects of space. I don't have anything to say about, I know the complexity of the situation, but the perceptive aspects and the lived aspects of space are well beyond my competence. And when I come back to the issue Madame Sophie has raised on this new types of citizenship, we are living in global cities as opposed to oppressed and perishable. The loss of the sense of place, if I understood the question well, I think that segregation is as old as cities themselves. But I also think that in the last days with the rise of this global economy, we are now witnessing a totally new transformation of segregation. We are told we are transiting from urban space as a dramatic space to urban space as a topological space in which lives are lived side by side without touching each other. This I think is a sign of the times. We have to reflect upon it. If nothing is done, then perhaps there are causes for concern. But I also believe that we would invent new ways of creating a sense of community and a sense of place. Just let me add something which relates to both. I think that conflict is something very healthy. What you describe of course for your daily life it must not be fun to have to negotiate. You are getting into your home. But for us observing violence, violence is the worst because that means just as you said atomized side by side people not talking to one another, calling the police because they cannot even knock on the door of their neighbors if they are too lousy. Whereas when there are conflicts, at least there is some vitality and some commonality that is expressed. That's what I meant. Hashim, to save your voice, you only have one minute. I just wanted to comment about the danger of essentialization in our understanding of cities. Rather than looking at what is the essence of Istanbul looking at how what we understand to be the city's DNA is actually coded. What I like about the way that you use DNA is rather than taking the term to mean what is essential about the place you presented to say what is the code that has been written to produce the city or what are the different codes that have been written to produce this place because that would allow us to also rewrite them and transform them. Thank you very much. I would like to close this session and the first day by making a very simple metaphor as we sit in this fishbowl looking out towards a history that we're not sure when it was. It certainly looks much older than it is. I think we've certainly tried to address the issue of confronting history through the excellent presentations and the very precise comments from the panel. I ask you to join me in thanking all the panel and all the speakers for this session. Thank you very much.