Boiling Frog: Establishing Authority over Historic Towns under Emergency

Abstract

In the contemporary Turkey, the concentrated authority over historic urban areas reached to an unprecedented peak that any researcher who deals with the contemporary heritage dynamics of Turkey needs to outline a narrative (similar to Polanski’s Chinatown) where one can trace power plays, political ambitions, land speculations, media manipulation, gender imbalance, and crime. Departing from the current power of local and central authorities, the paper’s curiosity is centered around one essential question: “How can one acquire such power?”.

To answer this question, the paper investigates the post-2005 developments in urban conservation practice in Turkey focusing on historic Fener and Balat districts. Through an investigation of legislative developments and urban implementation in historic quarters of İstanbul, the paper analyzed the social, political and economic context that gradually helped authorities concentrate more power over historic areas. As such, the paper reveals that a potential future emergency situation was the main reasoning of these developments that helped current authorities gradually concentrate more power.