The Modern Reality of Istanbul’s Urban Chaos

This is Views from the Metropolis, a monthly column by Paul Osterlund on Turkey's urban transformation due to development, conflict, and migration.

It was a warm, bright afternoon when I stepped out of the metro. I had lost count of how many stops had gone by. I found myself in the center of Bağcılar, a densely populated Istanbul district of more than 700,000. Its main street is closed to traffic and was swarming with pedestrian life. It was perhaps the liveliest scene I have seen in my seven years in the buzzing metropolis. Being the first Sunday of the month, Bağcılar’s working-class residents had probably just received their paychecks and were out enjoying their day off with their families. Couples wandered hand-in-hand with ice cream cones as young children weaved seamlessly through the crowds.

Bağcılar is one of many districts in Istanbul that has a reputation for nonexistent urban planning, overcrowding, petty crime, unemployment, and poverty. The city’s official population has surpassed fifteen million, and a serious chunk of it lives in places like Bağcılar, known as the varoş. It is a tricky term to translate. Neither ghetto nor slum nor shantytown—though possessing elements of each one—the varoş generally refers to a low-income, densely-packed enclave well outside the city center that Istanbulites from the middle class and above relish in avoiding at all costs.

The modern reality of Istanbul is often overshadowed by its significance as a former imperial capital and its requisite collection of historic treasures. Today, the most famous areas are places where all the tourists go but where very few Istanbulites actually live. The city is famed for its spectacular views of the Bosphorus and its glittering waters. Millions come visit and traverse its narrow, steep streets dotted with marvelous buildings and structures representing a vast array of architectural styles, spanning centuries and empires.

For millions of its residents, however, Istanbul is a bewildering labyrinth of apartment blocks with slender, patchy streets and sidewalks. In many neighborhoods, those lucky enough to afford a car park where they can at their own risk—first come, first serve. There is simply not enough space for everyone to park, and the city continues to build underground parking garages, which often requires something with more soul to be demolished or open space to be squandered. Green space is limited—though that can be said for the entire city at this point—and commutes to more central areas are long and tedious, though expansion in the city’s public transit network over the past several years has considerably improved mobility.

Wave after wave of migration from the country’s rural areas resulted in sprawl and an explosion in the city’s population. In 1965, less than two million people lived in Istanbul, but by 1980 it jumped to just under three million. It is now at least five times that. Rural land was quickly built up, initially with informal shacks that were replaced by multistory buildings. The former edges of the city soon became increasingly more central as the city rapidly expanded on both the European and Asian sides.

Bordering Bağcilar is the district of Esenler. It was a Greek village called Litros from the Byzantine era until the beginning of the Turkish Republic, when a population exchange agreement geared toward ethnically purifying each country uprooted Greeks living Turkey and Turks living in Greece. Esenler’s current population stands at just over 450,000 sharing an area of fifteen square miles. Imagine the population of Atlanta crammed into a space an eighth of that city’s size. Like Bağcılar, Esenler has its own main pedestrian-only street that is often bustling. A metro stop in the district, the interior of which looks as if it was designed by an eighty-five-year-old grandmother on acid, spills out into an oddly enticing strip of urban chaos.

On a balmy Saturday night in August, a kinetic energy blanketed the area. Rows of shops with glittery, persuasive neon signs beckoned passersby to step through their doors. One young couple had just gotten hitched at a local wedding hall and the guests had spilled out onto the sidewalk. Arabic is spoken everywhere as Esenler is home to many Syrian refugees who have opened numerous shops and restaurants in the district. The atmosphere is undeniably conservative and the few establishments serving alcohol are the kinds only men go to, and which have opaque windows, likely to prevent their wives from spotting them take a forbidden sip.

My friend Sonay is pursuing a Ph.d. in anthropology in the US, though she spent her formative years in Esenler, where her family still lives and where she stays when visiting Turkey. I asked her to elaborate on the best and worst things about growing up there:

“The most important advantage to growing up in Esenler is being far removed from a sheltered life. You are really at the center of life and you are a part of many people’s lives, some of which are strange, melancholy, more often than not full of pain, and, occasionally, comical to a ridiculous degree. To be able to recognize the beautiful aspects of Istanbul alongside its difficulties, rather than from within a more sterile existence, one has to look at what is happening on the periphery of the center, and if possible, to be able to live in it,” she said.

Sonay’s take on the negative aspects of her neighborhood amounted to no small list:

“The bad things are innumerable. Sacrificing two hours round-trip to get anywhere, having your soul sucked by traffic and crowded public buses, not being able to get anywhere on foot, and for this reason sometimes not wanting to leave home at all, as a woman feeling (like in most places in the city) that you are always being looked at, not feeling safe. When I was a child there were at least some empty areas and a little bit of green space to play in. Nowadays everywhere is covered in concrete and the same drab buildings that are so close together that when you take a breath someone in the next apartment can hear you.”

No one is more qualified than long-time residents like Sonay to describe places like Esenler. But for outsiders, it’s often just as easy to find humanity and positive energy in an unknown area as it is to condemn it. I’ve spent countless hours over the years wandering around places like Bağcılar and Esenler, a luxury afforded by not being confined by a day job that forces me to reckon with the city’s terrible traffic and overcrowded transit vehicles at peak hours. I’ve covered incredible ground via these excursions, wandering backstreet after alley of huge districts that many of my Turkish friends have only so much as passed through in a hurry.

Throughout one restless stretch of about two weeks late last summer, I would go out in the evening and walk around until midnight, just in time to catch the last metro back home. On these journeys I encountered busy night markets, street food vendors, midnight football matches, poorly-lit bars that were bizarrely as inviting as they were intimidating, litters of adorable puppies that will grow and join the ranks of the city’s famously forlorn street dogs, the tags of banned militant groups haphazardly scrawled on crumbling walls.

During a recent chilly evening, I found myself climbing up a steep hill in the Validesuyu neighborhood in the northern district of Gaziosmanpaşa. Istanbul is known as the City of Seven Hills but there are at least that many in this quarter alone. Relief was nowhere in sight when I reached the top because I could see the peak of its successor looming straight ahead. It was dinner time and the potent, seductive scents of olive oil and garlic wafted out of ground floor windows. Many buildings in Validesuyu are of a ramshackle quality but the glistering, gated high-rises that have begun to invade a number of varoş aren’t far away. My thighs seared as I ascended to the final slope and emerged onto flat ground. Strolling on it after the punishing hills felt like gliding by on a moving sidewalk. It was dark and the crescent moon glinted triumphantly in the backdrop of its navy sky. I wasn’t sure which bus I needed to take back, so I kept walking.

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