The lure of the city

NAPOLEON WAS IMPRESSED with Istanbul. If all the world were a single state, he said, this city should be its capital. A generation ago, when it looked musty and neglected, that would have seemed far-fetched, but now this great metropolis at the confluence of Europe and Asia pulses with trans-global traffic. Some 50,000 ships a year traverse the narrow waterway that bisects the city. A colourful mix of Polish package tourists, Indonesian pilgrims, Ghanaian textile traders, Kazakh students and honeymooning Saudis passes through its snaking airport immigration queues, and a polyglot crowd ceaselessly throngs Istiklal Street, attesting to Istanbul’s growing magnetism.

In 2010, the city’s Ataturk International airport ranked as the world’s 37th-busiest by number of passengers. By 2014 it had vaulted to 13th place. Istanbul already has a second airport and is furiously building a third, scheduled to open in 2018. When fully operational, it will be the world’s largest, ready to handle 150m passengers a year.

The project, worth around $30 billion, has caused plenty of controversy. It is rising amid protected wetlands and faces charges of cronyism in awarding construction contracts. But few Istanbullus doubt the need for a giant new air hub. Measured by “international connectivity”—the frequency of flights to foreign destinations—the city comes fifth in the world, but it is advancing faster than its rivals. London, the leader, became 4% more “connected” between 2009 and 2015, according to Mastercard; over the same period Istanbul’s connectivity grew by a roaring 111%.

The city is racing ahead in other ways, too. It already has about 16m people, compared with barely 2m in 1975, and between now and 2018 it will overtake both London and Moscow as the most populous urban area in Europe. According to Euromonitor, a research firm, six of Europe’s ten fastest-growing cities are in Turkey (see chart).

Countries such as India and China have witnessed similar urban explosions, but Turkish cities stand out for also offering an impressive quality of life. The proportion of Turks living in cities has swollen from about half the population 30 years ago to 75% today. Between 2000 and 2015 its major urban areas absorbed 15m new residents. Yet despite their rapid growth, Turkish cities are by and large admirably free of squalor and crime. Middle-class parts of Istanbul, Ankara or Izmir, in Turkey’s relatively prosperous west, are indistinguishable from their far wealthier West European counterparts. Yet even the slums in big eastern cities such as Gaziantep and Diyarbakir have proper sanitation, tidy paved streets, parks and well-maintained schools.

It was not always thus. Thirty years ago the hills around Turkish cities looked much like Brazil’s, stacked higgledy piggledy with unlicensed shantytowns appropriately known as gecekondu (built overnight). Istanbul had worse public transport, worse water quality and worse pollution than shambolic Cairo; the cheap lignite used for home heating clouded its winter skies in a perpetual acrid fug, and the soupy waters of the Golden Horn, a sea inlet that bisects the European side of the city, were too polluted to sustain fish.

A better place to live

Istanbul’s skies are now notably clear, and the fishermen who crowd the railings of the Galata Bridge into the wee hours hoist up sardines by the bucketful. The radical change is not just a result of better sewerage and cleaner heating fuel in the form of natural gas piped from Russia. Starting in the 1980s, Turkey made a series of important legislative changes. Various amnesties granted legal title to gecekondu dwellers, making them stronger stakeholders and allowing them to leverage property assets. A sweeping reform in 1984 consolidated big urban areas into powerful municipalities with elected mayors. Further reforms in the 2000s did the same thing at district level. Cities now generate their own revenues, make their own deals with private firms and start their own businesses, though the central government keeps enough of a hold on the purse strings to ensure fiscal discipline.

Cumulatively, these undramatic changes have had a remarkable effect. “Local democracy really seems to have worked in this sense,” says Yasar Adanali, an urban planner in Istanbul. “To climb up the ladder in their party or be seen at the national level, municipal managers have to shine.” Mr Erdogan himself rose out of local Istanbul politics, and many of his closest associates came to prominence in the same way. The city’s 39 districts are showcases for their mayors, who compete to provide better services. In most of the city, streets are swept and rubbish collected at least once a day.

The Greater Istanbul Municipality, for its part, has the resources to build or sponsor big investments in infrastructure, with notable results. The first underground line of its metro system opened only in 2000, but progress has been rapid, with an underground linking the Asian side of the city to the European one completed in 2013.

Yet the picture is not all rosy. Despite all the investment, only 15% of journeys in Istanbul are made by public transport; the city has more congested roads than any other in Europe. Increasingly, too, the growth of Turkish cities has been driven less by careful planning than by business interests, often backed by powerful politicians.

Istanbul’s new airport is a case in point. The municipality’s own 2009 master plan provided for it to be built to the west of the city, in flatter lands already connected to Istanbul’s main traffic axis. Ministers in Ankara intervened to move it to the north, amid forested hills that were meant to be preserved for recreation and as the main catchment for Istanbul’s water supply. The giant site was largely public land, but to attract private builders much of it will be turned over to commercial use for hotels, shops and airport services. Connecting the airport to the city will require millions more trees to be felled: as part of the project a new motorway will cut through forests to link to a new, third bridge across the Bosporus.

A new motorway will cut through forests to link to a new, third bridge across the Bosporus

Environmentalists and urban planners argue that the purpose of the motorway is not so much to relieve traffic as to open new areas to property development. Already, Istanbul’s once-green northern reaches are being covered over by gated luxury communities and shopping centres. “With the current planning structure we know there is no way to stop the building,” says Akif Burak Atlar of the Turkish Union of Urban Planners. “The incentives for business and government are too strong.”

The consortium of Turkish developers that won the build-own-operate lease for the new airport includes firms thought to be close to the AK party. Foreign financiers, not least the World Bank, have kept away, partly because of a corruption investigation involving several of the firms’ senior executives, launched in 2013 but suspended after the government intervened.

Across the country vast areas of state lands, and in some cases city parks, have been handed to private developers. The one that caught the most public attention was Istanbul’s Gezi Park, a rare patch of green in the heart of the city. A century ago this had been the site of an army barracks where Ottoman soldiers protested against encroaching secularism. For symbolic reasons Mr Erdogan strongly backed a project to recreate the long-demolished structure as a faux-Ottoman shopping centre. But the green space held equally strong symbolism for many Istanbullus. The scheme was blocked by a massive urban protest, an eruption of the cumulative anguish felt by many locals about runaway development in which dozens of skyscrapers rose and more than 90 other shopping malls sprouted between looping motorways. “Gezi was just one too many of the crimes that have been committed against Istanbul,” says Mr Adanali.