“If earth was a nation, then Istanbul would be its capital“

This quote attributed to Napoleon has been used and re-used by Turkish president Recep Tayip Erdogan, and his party the AKP to justify their ambition to reshape the city into a global megalopolis which would showcase its rebirth as well as its Turkish grandeur, reminiscent of the Ottoman Empire.
In a few decades Istanbul expanded dramatically from 50000 to 150000 acres while its population jumped from 8 to 15 million inhabitants becoming the largest city in Europe and in the Mediterranean basin.
Articulated around “great” infrastructure projects, such as Kanal Istanbul, the new airport or the 3rd Bosporus bridge, a new city model is designed to appeal and shape the minds of the Islamic-conservative family around three pillars: the gated community, the mosque and the mall.
In the process entire communities living in “gecekondus” (long existing informal neighborhoods) have been dismantled, and offered alternative shelter in soulless concrete buildings far from their livelihood. The same is happening with rural villages around Istanbul, they are, with their inhabitants, slowly erased from the map. Environmental issues, linked to the destruction of parts of the city forest and available water resources have also raised major concerns.
Very few metropolises in the world today offer such a contrast between its image, an oriental gem shaped by centuries of history and the reality lived by most of its inhabitants. These new topographies exemplify the rhizome concept, defined by Gilles Deleuze and Guattari in their book “A Thousand Plateaus”, as a somehow monstrous multiple resurgences of the city in a deterritorialization and reterritorialization process.
This work explores the flip side of Istanbul, the consequences of policies outlined in Erdogan’s Hedef 23 project, (Target 23) which has the ambition for the centennial of the republic to bring Turkey in the world 10thstrongest economies, and gaining back its dominant position in Mediterranean.