wet dreams of wet cement

for the benefit of non-turkophone readers, i got to start this post with a brief:

within the last few weeks
1. a number of public land holdings have been offered for sale and the zorlu group,
the owner of vestel, already bought some huge prime real estate in the heart of
istanbul's "skyscrapers district". do not let the epithet mislead you, the tallest
building here goes 30-40 stories high, lower than the skyline of a mediocre midwest
town in the u.s., although revenues do make the mouths of arab oil sheikhs water.

2. the head of the government, other elected and appointed officials have begun to utter
exaggerated numbers of tourists expected to visit turkey. now, these people are no
dunces and they have at their disposal all figures and statistics.
hence, they know that tourism in turkey is not only an economic but also an
environmental, cultural and developmental midden which nobody dares probe, drain,
clear or even cover. probably since the mention of the word tourism induces a state of
euphoric pipe dreams of sun drenched beaches, white sails, green treks, hot spas or
snowy hills spiced with new, renewed, rehashed or escapade love affairs; nobody really
questions official figures (nobody questions figures anyway, it is still officially
uncertain what turkey's population is!). by the way, although of course such misdeeds
never happen in this land, transparency international cites construction and
tourism as the two most corrupt industries suitable for large scale money
laundering. add to that the fact that one most favored industry of the novo italian
mafia is landfills, especially in the mezzogiorno which still maintains a hefty portion of
its feudal character.

so what? am i against development? am i against capital infusion? am i against the reconstruction of istanbul? am i against the mafia?

not necessarily... every capital infusion allows the total cake to grow somewhat. except, real estate enterprises can hardly be called investments; their value-added contribution is usually lateral rather than vertical. that is why in older economy texts, they used to be called placements.

the reconstruction of istanbul is essential, but not the construction of an istanbul anew. currently, the city, situated in an incredibly attractive natural and geographic setting, is one of the ugliest in the civilized and semi civilized world - take out the relatively virgin historic peninsula and what remains of pera, you are left with heap after heap of clustered masses of concrete, clustered into congested confines where a congealed lifestyle draggles behind a time wasting, tiresome, inefficient national economy. what istanbul needs is tearing down that ill used space and building from scratch according to rational plans. istanbul, to become something real, desperately needs urban utopia of renascence and metanoia.

constructing a burgeoning new, plastic, inflated toy town on the immediate rim of the old city is the textbook worst scenario in urbanization, a guide to what not to do. just considering the extra burden on the plight of the infrastructure and the extra idle population it will draw into the city should be enough to discourage such wet dreams of drowning istanbul under cement. but more importantly, the end-result is so ugly, it so denies the historical heritage of the two empires that created constantinopolis, it is an epitome of characterless poor taste.

so, yes, i am against this epidemic of wet dreams of wet cement pouring destructively into one of the rarest landscapes on earth. i am particularly against this idea of scopophilic "development" consisting on the veneration of phallic concrete dolmens blocking the sight and breath of the city; the american injected oil sheikh idolatry of the so-called new in foul appreciation of the classical. i amnauseated by this malgusto arabian model of urban concretization that greedy, taste poor, culturally noveau riche accolytes here swallow as development and insist on pushing down my throat with wet cement.

let them spill their seeds on that wet cement. we already have enough eyesore monsters anyway.