pride in our parks

I received a message on LinkedIn asking me whether I wanted to share a regeneration project I was involved in to be promoted by some online publication. The request didn't appear anything much more than an attempt to aggregate some success stories for a self-proclaimed publisher and their blog/book/magnum opus.

Nonetheless, I tried to come up with something worthy of a mention and moments before I would receive a notification on my Twitter feed of a retweet by RioOnWatch, I reminisced of an emotional moment just about 4 years ago these days from Rio de Janeiro.

At the time, I was in charge of coordinating and running the floor for the Urban Age 2013 Conference -- as Rio was gearing up for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, we were investigating major investments (mainly in transport and regeneration) and whether they related to / tried to alleviate some of the chronic problems facing the city. We wanted to highlight Parque Madureira as one that gifted the city with a public asset in a once redundant / obsolete part of the city.

The architects in charge of the project presented the project at the conference. While prepping for the actual conference, testing A/V and lighting, we've run each presentation to the desired setup and presentation sequence. One of the technicians in charge for the technical desk first erupted to shouts, laughters and excitement which were then slowly left to a mix of emotions and tears. He later told me he grew up in the area of regeneration, and was now using the park and very proud of it being showcased as a prime example of regeneration at the Conference.

This, for us, was a testimony of a story of success and one that probably merits a narrative and a reminder at times when there's little appetite or faith left in mass regeneration. At a time when I've been desperately searching for some inspiration, how I recall the joy and pride in that man's eyes...

When J. pulled me aside, my phone had been dead for just short of two hours. When he reluctantly asked if I knew what was going on, he probably did not genuinely think I did not. Despite our age difference and having only seen each other a few times in our lives, I trusted he knew me well enough to recognise a man in me whose ears were often on the ground. He might have also sensed that I am someone who emotionally connects to those, who may be thousands of miles away.

That reluctance, helped by A.’s initial support would do just about enough to keep my nerves in check. Now I knew for a fact that the sickly feeling I had been having in the past hour was telepathically linked to what was going on back home. J. looked worried, though. For a man who made the bold decision with his wife to take their family to a 10-day long trip across the country on the day its main airport had seen the worst terror attack in its history; for a man whose country has seen no fewer problems than mine, his eyes laid bare the truth. Things looked to be seriously getting out of control.

I rushed downstairs to make a few phone calls. Had Z. found a safe haven? Mom and Sister should have been alright, far from the centre of it all, but how did they feel? Where was Dad? They must have been trying to reach me… People around me started to ask how I felt, a question I thought I’ve heard all too often lately, in between Brexit and all sort of troubles in Turkey. Somehow, I was unable to give a concise answer, the painful indifference I wanted to resort to, I too often have in the recent past, was nowhere to be found. Lack of a clear answer to the simple question of ‘what is going on?’ was weighing too heavily. After all, this wasn’t one of those events with grave consequences on my life in which I had no say, or those where the privileged status of mine and those around me would keep us ‘statistically’ safe. This was a moment of great uncertainty, and was already traumatising those I most cared about.

As the sense of urgency started to give way to confusion and disgust, I tried to collect myself, and decided to follow A.’s advice, not to spend the rest of the night on my own. The inevitable death to my phone’s battery in a few hours’ time would also mean an unavoidable distancing from constant flow of information. It didn’t mean emotional detachment, but gave enough breathing space to avoid suffocation through the thick and humid air of Venice.

Wherever I went over the weekend, I was greeted with the natural, inevitable question – trying to make sense of the events with the little information at hand and communication I could keep with those back home. There has recently been a running gag with friends back home: how the UK politics, for once, has stolen the scene from the Turkish political landscape. While I heavily continued to comment on mainstream British politics recently, I felt at such unease to even come up with meaningful deliberations of thoughts and feelings in this latest saga. It was not all that different from June 2013 – where I would find my hands tied, fully submerged in front of my office computer in London on a Friday evening, watching developments unfold thousands of miles away. My boss R. would sympathise and let me take the earliest possible flight so I could be with those who I loved – the same R., who on Friday night put his head against mine and consoled me. No trip was to be had, though, all access was removed.

Over the years, I’ve reluctantly learned to tame my emotions towards incidents that are out of my immediate control or reach – at least to such an extent that I surprise myself as remaining one of the calmer people in a group of acquaintances when a major incident takes place. Combined with our day’s horrific sense of the normalisation of the evil, this has helped me distance myself from the immediate feelings of devastation and threat… an involuntary and compromised resilience of some sort. I am also trying to take the optimistic view on things in life, often conflicting with my true feelings and often with the risk of appearing naïve or ill-conceived [legitimising the evil] by those whose opinions I care about.

One of the greatest travesties of our times is our indifference to the nuances of mass sufferings around us. There are too many of them and adjusting our moral compasses to build a hierarchy amongst them has not helped either. The mainstream media has a lot of blame to take here. And what little of the nuances mainstream foreign media covered over the weekend has been short-handed, if not ill-conceived. It was almost a return to the early days of Erdogan’s ascendancy to power – the simple narration of dichotomy had prevailed.

And it is then, I finally started to reflect on the numerous conference sessions and exhibitions I experienced in the last few days and search for a meaning behind the events over the weekend and how to position one for the future. Forensic Architecture’s work at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale (http://www.forensic-architecture.org/…/reporting-front-ven…/) is one of those few pieces that respond directly, and with strong relevance to its title and its brief – Reporting From the Front. Visually constructing the scenes of drone strikes at victims’ households by weaving forensic data into a re-rendering of architectural details communicated through various forms of narrative, the exhibition shakes your indifference and detachment from all forms of physical and geographical sense of being and puts you right into the thick of it. Three case studies follow the scales of Afghan families’ kitchens to Gaza residents’ streets and the vast Mediterranean that migrants so desperately try to cross. To those who pay even the minimum of attentions, there is no catastrophe deprived of our senses.

Perhaps the inability to 'report from the front' as I often do, was what was getting to me. And perhaps, unlike Gezi Park, but in light of all these sensations, I was internalising and was internalised in the events that unfolded over the weekend – distancing was ever more difficult but somehow the rupture felt ever more real. So much so that my often-found optimism left its way to confusion and a form of mutism. As the aftermath started to unfold through Saturday and Sunday, it was more apparent that the necessity to own the narrative of inclusion, togetherness, and resistance to oppression and the tyranny of the majority is urgent. For everything we would wish to turn a blind eye, we shall be reminded of our collective duties. And for every moment we lose hope, we need to keep investigating, forensically, to find and pave our path to recovery.

lucid disguise

Of all the possible juxtapositions in this part of #eastend this has always intrigued me the greatest: 

In the foreground is Carter House of Holland Estate by East End Homes in #spitalfields, a typical 1930s social housing estate, home to a large Bangladeshi community who has made large parts of#bricklane what it is today (on that note: brick lane has been a street of constant transformation over the past century and a half, something that's got frequently missed out on the anarchists vs. cereal-maker gentrifiers debate last year). In the background is the Nido Building functioning primarily as a private student accommodation unit. In any other context, a building whose architectural style I find more appealing than other people may, its cladding and dominant blue hue convey to me a false interpretation openness and transparency.

Both estates/buildings are located within the borough of Tower Hamlets, where its edge with the City of London is defined by Middlesex Street, right beside, to the west of Nido Building. The borough council's revenues from Nido's development may even have helped preserve and maintain Holland Estate to date, although we know there is an imminent threat of destruction to pave way for a new development. 

This is a site that sits right in between recently developed, tourist-attracting Spitalfields, developing and startup/incubation promoting, Norton Folgate, rapidly changing, looks-more-like-Manhattan neighbourhood of Aldgate and of course, the behemoth that is the City of London. All of these areas historically, as well as economically established and diverse, naturally prone to phases of structural transformation. #cutlerstreet #clothierstreet existing and transformed (Discount Suit Company) textile and fashion stores are all reminiscent of the huge legacy of this particular site of East End. No wonder why, of course, the pedestrian footfall on #brunestreet where this photo is taken is almost zero while city workers, students, walking tours, lunch breakers flock to arteries and avenues nearby.

Yet in the middle of this mish-mash, what stands out for me is how Nido Building's almost curtain/wall-like shape cuts Holland Estate from the rest of its surroundings in a way no other block of buildings are so visually overshadowed by other City towers that are architecturally so much more forthcoming and eye-catching, such as the Gherkin or Heron Tower just further south. You could argue that this wall protects Holland Estate in a symbolism representative of urban walls we know of our recent past, be it the Berlin Wall, Iron Curtain or the Western Wall. And for that reason, like all other walls before and after it, to me it represents a threat and a cursing in not so much disguise...

Lest the Ground Forgets

Commissioned by and published on the ArteEast Magazine's ArteEast Quarterly Spring 2015 issue. With gratitude to Ipek Ulusoy Akgul and Raja'a Khalid. The original piece can be read here.

When the Prince of Wales made an intervention to ask the authorities in the UAE, it was about saving a cultural and historical asset that was of national significance to the Emirati on a land that belonged to them[i]. Twenty-one years later a similar request was made by the Prince, to the Qatari wealth-owners on a land they owned for a major development scheme. This time, though, that piece of land happened to be in the heart of London, which is today itself trying to cope with a similar urban challenge of its own: defining a patchwork of a city with its ever-expanding catalogue of high-rise towers and ultra-modern developments – many of which are now financed by investments from the same region that it has, in the past, acted as a protectorate to.

The relationships between the British and those in the wider geography of the Gulf are deep and long-lived. As Britain increased its influence in the Middle East from the 19th century onwards, it has forged a 150-year old history in the Omani Gulf – their ever-increasing paternalistic assumption of a protectorate role reached a peak with the discovery of oil in Abu Dhabi in the late 1950s. This model of indirect control through ‘local collaborators’ can be said to exist today, in even more complex form where some of the roles are now reversed. That the UAE is now proudly showcasing a collection of recent landmarks, finds no barrier to warrant a title reflective of a very popular contemporary theme on urban landscapes: memory andidentity[ii].

As the same British engineers who worked for the development of the Shuwaikh Port in Kuwait surveyed the Dubai creek for dredging and widening to expand the infrastructure to serve a larger metropolis, loans were granted by the Kuwaiti and Qatari ruling families through the intermediary of the British Bank of the Middle East (formerly British Imperial Bank of Iran). The British Bank of the Middle East then provided services beyond that of a commercial bank and helped cement the emergence of modern Dubai. The flexible master-plan prepared by British architect/planner John Harris provided the framework for future development, as Dubai set up its own national bank in the late 1960s. Dubai’s own oil exports began in 1969 and led to the rapid expansion of the city from its initial layout, which consisted of three neighborhoods, Deira, Al Shindagah and Bur Dubai, around the Creek, a formation established long before the arrival of the British, owing to the city’s history of pearl diving and trade[iii].

When the rulers decided they no longer needed to keep some of the earlier settlements, al Bastakiya[iv] was amongst those slated for demolition in the 1980s, in order to open up space for a new skyscraper complex. In came the Prince of Wales, to pledge a convincing appeal to his hosts to keep al Bastakiya intact. At the time, Prince Charles was widely known for his favorable attitude to conservation and a severe dislike of the increasing “vertical, straight, unbending, only at right angles – and functional” architecture in London[v], a staunch position he maintains till today. Chief amongst his most recent victims has been architect Richard Rogers whose schemes for Paternoster Square and Royal Opera House projects were famously slashed by the Prince’s intervention[vi].

As seen with the case of al Bastakiya, Prince Charles’ ideas on architecture have always reached a zone of influence far beyond the boundaries of the British Isles, not just in geography but monetarily too. The latest row caused by the Prince has been over the Chelsea Barracks redevelopment in Westminster. When British newspapers reported in 2009, that the Prince had written to the Qatari Diar to pull back its support from Rogers’ scheme; the whole episode let to a lawsuit for damages of up to £81 million to property developers[vii].

Renderings from the Richard Rogers’ proposed. Withdrawn after a special request by Prince Charles to the Qatari Diar.
Credit: Chelsea Barracks, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners

Squire & Partners’ approved scheme, on the way to realization.
Credit: http://www.primeresi.com

However, despite the Chelsea Barracks fiasco, it is surprising to see just how much of London’s architectural portfolio is affected by Gulf investment. The Shard, the tallest building in the European Union is the jewel in the crown of a wide London real-estate portfolio enjoyed by the same Qatari Diar, which includes, among others, the town’s infamous shopping center, some of its most expensive residential units, a portion of its stock exchange, the American Embassy, and a major investment, the East Village, around the site of the London 2012 Olympics[viii]. Funnily enough, the Shard was one particular architectural centerpiece for which the then Deputy Prime Minister issued a planning consent despite heavy opposition from heritage bodies.

Qatar’s neighbors just across the bay, too, have aggressively been investing to get valuable pieces of the city, and although they have recently failed to buy the signature financial district of Canary Wharf in London[ix], the Mayor of London goes to work every day on land developed by financial resources from Kuwait. In 2012, Saudi Arabia invested £60 billion into the UK, while Abu Dhabi’s royal family have become the largest landowners in Mayfair (after the Duke of Westminster) following their own continuous investments since 2006 now valued at of £5 billion[x],[xi]. Some of these projects are naturally faced with much inspection for example, a deal struck with the Bahraini Government in 2013 to help build a new community on a 500-hectare land in the south of the country received much scrutiny from the British public with respect to the latter’s way of dealing with democracy protests during the “Arab Spring”[xii].

Gulf countries are, of course, not alone in investing in one of the most liquid real-estate markets, as their share of investments is on par with those from the Chinese, and also the Norwegians through their government-backed pension fund, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds [xiii]. Owing partly to the less hospitable atmosphere in the United States following the 9/11 attacks, as well as the deep-rooted ties between the Gulf and the UK, the latter has found a source of bullion. It is with relish that the Mayor of London accentuates the city’s status as the unchallenged holder of the “unofficial title as the ‘eighth emirate’”[xiv].

Propelled by this resurgence in its upmarket real-estate, this “eighth emirate” has been forced to make a decision on what type of preservation it should turn its back on: the much-loved landscape or the early-20th century planning ideal that has come to protect much of what still makes Great Britain a mixed land of post-industry and greenery. “Growing up” or “growing out” have been the two alternatives, and the former has been the favored option with demand for high-rises increasing on an annual bases[xv].

Known largely for investing in the trendier areas of Mayfair where Gulf buyers are estimated to be making 10 per cent of all purchases, money has started to pour across the city with an eye to reap the highest benefits from its recovering housing market[xvi]. However, not all of this skywards growth is associated with creation of new human environments. The increasing number of “ghost blocks” has been an outspoken phenomenon[xvii] and with acute housing crisis becoming one of the key talking points for the upcoming general elections in May, there emerges a discrepancy between these new towers of steel and glass and the land upon which they sit.

While this special relationship between London and the Gulf continues to receive a helping hand from the Mayor with his occasional trips to the latter region, there seems to be very limited space left for the Prince who would much rather these skylines be built elsewhere: “It would be a tragedy if the character and skyline of our capital city were to be further ruined and St Paul’s dwarfed by yet another giant glass stump, better suited to downtown Chicago than the City of London”[xviii].

London’s newly found excitement[xix] in ushering foreign investment is counterweighed against its attempts of creating “new old neighborhoods” as part of a legacy plan that sits within a much larger framework of its urban desires[xx]. This sentiment repeats itself in the Gulf, which also grapples with contemporary and contrasting views on urbanism. As new developments in the Gulf continue to mimic Los Angeles or Las Vegas[xxi] more than the Londinium of the Romans, it is difficult to fully explain the rich legacy from which one should expect to draw a different diagram of what “Middle Eastern / Arab / Islamic urbanism” may be. If Richard Rogers is one of today’s most established architects in the UK, Sir Norman Foster’s name will be even more familiar to those in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates; his firm’s work includes the National Bank and the International Airport in the former and the Index Building in the latter. An ideologue by his own definitions, his vision for the future may have been a motivation for his selection by the people behind the Masdar City development in Abu Dhabi.

Masdar City, to which the Prince of Wales was once made a patron, is principled on the buzzword of current urban times: “sustainability”. It would be a major mistake to single out Masdar as an outlier in the long Middle Eastern tradition of sustainable architecture and urbanism. The project’s ambitions to create a zero-carbon city with its reduced need for energy and water borrows from a long tradition of effective architectural principles developed around these geographies. The city’s tight and dense grid is a direct response to the Islamic urban principle of narrow streets allowing penetration of light and circulation of air, many examples of which can be found not only in the winding streets of Andalucia in southern Spain but in the historic neighborhoods such as al Bastakiya in Dubai[xxii] — whose famous wind towers motivated the Prince’s calls for preservation, have been interpreted with a modern twist at one of the few buildings, namely the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, that have been realized in what otherwise has been an ill-fated project due to the 2008 financial squeeze[xxiii].

The question regarding the quality of the urban environments in which we live has, intrinsically, as much to do with the aesthetic principles with which they are built, as it has with what sort of human environments they create and who calls the shots (and how) on who will be experiencing these environments, if anyone at all. Just as the Harris master-plan provided a backbone to what was to follow, the opposite forces now leave significant marks on the capital of the once-protectorate. It may help to let go of foregone titles, in favor of a more consistent dialogue, both within and with one another.

[i] Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, “Breathing Life into Bastakiya and the History of Dubai,” The World Post, Huffington Post, August 5, 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sultan-sooud-alqassemi/breathing-life-into-basta_b_488900.html (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[ii] “Lest We Forget: Structures of Memory in the UAE,” National Pavilion UAE, Venice Architecture Biennale. http://nationalpavilionuae.org/architecture/2014-2/ (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[iii] Stephen J. Ramos, “The Blueprint: A History of Dubai’s Spatial Development Through Oil Discovery,” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, June 2009.http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Ramos_-_Working_Paper_-_FINAL.pdf (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[iv] Now renamed Al Fahidi Historic District.

[v] “A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales at the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Royal Gala Evening at Hampton Court Palace,” May 30, 1984.http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/media/speeches/speech-hrh-the-prince-of-wales-the-150th-anniversary-of-the-royal-institute-of (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[vi] Robert Booth, “Richard Rogers: ‘Prince Charles wrecked my Chelsea project’,” June 16, 2009.http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jun/16/richard-rogers-prince-charles-architecture (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[vii] Sarah Bell, “Prince Charles’s role in battle of Chelsea Barracks,” June 26, 2010.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10282415 (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[viii] Jon Henley, “How much of London is owned by Qatar’s royal family?” December 9, 2014.http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/dec/09/london-qatar-royal-family-regents-park-200m-palace-harrods (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[ix] Kate Allen, “Songbird board rejects Canary Wharf bid,” January 12, 2015.http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ab9521b4-9a6d-11e4-9602-00144feabdc0.html (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[x] Taher Al-Sharif, “Two-Way Traffic”. July 24, 2013.http://www.majalla.com/eng/2013/07/article55243729 (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[xi] Sam Webb, “How wealthy Gulf Arabs are buying up huge swathes of the capital – and now make up a tenth of all buyers in exclusive Mayfair” August 17, 2014. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2727212/How-wealthy-Gulf-Arabs-buying-huge-swathes-capital-including-150m-Mayfair-property-year-alone.html (last accessed January 7, 2015).

[xii] Cahal Milmo and James Cusick, “First Poundbury, now Bahrain: Should Prince Charles really be selling town planning to despots?” May 14, 2013. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/first-poundbury-now-bahrain-should-prince-charles-really-be-selling-town-planning-to-despots-8616371.html (last accessed January 20, 2015).

[xiii] Ivana Kottasova, “China and Qatar buying London properties,” November 11, 2014. money.cnn.com/2014/11/11/real_estate/london-real-estate-property/ (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[xiv] Ben Flanagan, “London mayor expects ‘spacecraft full of bullion’ from Arabian Gulf to land in his city,” February 26, 2015. http://www.thenational.ae/business/economy/london-mayor-expects-spacecraft-full-of-bullion-from-arabian-gulf-to-land-in-his-city (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[xv] Kate Allen, “Forest of luxury flats rises on London’s skyline,” March 15, 2015.http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a4df73e0-c96d-11e4-b2ef-00144feab7de.html#axzz3UZj1Plbj (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[xvi] Lucy Barnard, “London counts on safe-haven appeal for Middle East real estate investors,” August 20, 2014. http://www.thenational.ae/business/property/london-counts-on-safe-haven-appeal-for-middle-east-real-estate-investors

[xvii] Nicholas Shaxson, “A Tale of Two Londons,” April 2013.http://www.vanityfair.com/style/society/2013/04/mysterious-residents-one-hyde-park-london (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[xviii] “A speech by HRH The Prince of Wales…’’ Ibid. (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[xix] Rowan Moore, “How a high-rise craze is ruining London’s skyline,” December 2, 2012.http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/dec/02/london-high-rise-craze-ruins-skyline

[xx] Ricky Burdett, “The London Olympics – making a ‘piece of city’,” August 1, 2012.http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/london-olympics-making-piece-of-city-burdett/ (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[xxi] Murray Fraser, and Nasser Golzari (eds.). Architecture and Globalisation in the Persian Gulf Region, 2013, p. 21.

[xxii] John Lockerbie, “An approach to understanding Islamic urban design,”http://catnaps.org/islamic/islaurb1.html (last accessed March 30, 2015).

[xxiii] Nicolai Ouroussoff, “In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises,” September 25, 2010.http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/arts/design/26masdar.html?_r=0 (last accessed March 30, 2015).

Berliner Mauer geek's early moring cycling

On early May Bank Holiday in the UK, I took the opportunity on the back of an unexpected early wake-up, to trace parts of the Berlin Wall along the Mitte-Kreuzberg border. As I randomly happened to be cycling from the Charite, southwards on Wilhelmstrasse, I realised I would cycle through Zimmerstrasse where the wall once stood.

Utilising my Berlin Wall App, I decided to check out some of the landmarks in the area, starting with this observation tower on Erna-Berger-Strasse, to the right of the picture. To the left of the picture, on the background, you can see the building of the Federal Ministry of the Environment - where a part of the wall has been preserved and integrated into the building. So, actually, on the ground floor, when you look through the front window, you see pieces of the wall, next to which the canteen workers were heaving their breakfast before the morning shift. 

 

I only recalled visiting the Topografie des Terrors (TdT) on one of my earlier visits to Berlin (during 2005-2008 period) after I came across again, this morning, on Zimmerstrasse. The building to the right is the current Federal Ministry of Finance - at the centre, you can see a stretch of the wall, with the exhibition (TdT: http://www.topographie.de/en/) to the left of it.

The Ministry of Finance building also happens to be the House of Ministries during the DDR period - somewhat the epicentre of DDR government politics.In 1965, a man named Heinz Hozapfel made a spectacular escape, with his family, from the top of the building: He hid in the toilet for the evening, and after the nightfall utilised a rope (with help by others) as a cableway to launch the family and glide them to freedom over the Wall.
 

Here is a Spiegel article from the time: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-46273676.html
...and here is a Die Welt article from 2000: http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article536957/Mit-der-Seilbahn-ueber-die-Mauer.html

 

Not far from the Ministry of Finance (to its west), and a stone's throw away from Checkpoint Charlie (to its east) is a permanent exhibition of some of he curiosities about the ways of how STASI (the DDR State Security) worked. It was too early in the morning for me to visit (the exhibition opens daily from 10 AM), but I need to come back as many would know my curiosity into the subject: http://ocavusoglu.blogspot.de/2007/03/elveda-stasi.html

Here is a juxtaposition with the building to the right, a wasteland (part of former 'death strip) to the left and a hot-air balloon, sponsored by Die Welt to the right.

Speaking of Die Welt, it is well worth mentioning the standpoint of Axel-Springer Publishing Company, that publishes Die Welt, among a number of other daily newspapers and magazines in Germany.

Axel Springer was an idealist who built his empire right at the border between the Federal Germany and the DDR (more on the building here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel-Springer-Hochhaus
His ideology was simple: "believing in German unity", though a conservative one at that.
It is rather less well-known that Die Welt, somewhat similar to the Daily Mail in the UK, ran a hate campaign against the leftists in the era of 1960s, and the infamous RAF. Rudi Dutschke was one leftist, shot in the street by a young boy, as he was being targeted by Die Welt, in 1968. 

While Axel-Springer Strasse (where I took this picture) is an amalgamation of out-of-place contemporary architecture, reminiscent of Potsdamer Platz, as it happens to be one of many former "death strip" areas, the irony lies in its neighbouring Rudi-Dutschke Strasse (formerly Kochstrasse), renamed in the honour of Rudi Dutschke after the leftist newspaper Tageszeitung (taz)'s persistent campaign. 

Even less-known is the work of the artist Peter Lenk "Peace Be With You" on the side of the wall of taz building that directly faces the Axel-Springer Hochhaus. The work clearly mocks the many penis-based cheap news that the likes of Die Welt and many other Axel-Springer publications spam the German society with: http://open.salon.com/blog/lost_in_berlin/2009/12/04/berlin_newspaper_erects_provocative_artwork

Tracing the Wall has been made easy by numerous attempts of the city authorities. Other than this useful app that I have been using (http://www.berlin.de/mauer/wo-war-die-mauer/app.en.html), the city has marked areas where the Wall once ran and demarcated streets with "Mauerweg" signs to keep Wall commuters along the path of where it used to stand.

 

As described earlier, there is still a plethora of 'waste land' in inner Berlin. The most famous regeneration attempts of these areas, made derelict as they used to form 'death strips' (the areas between the Wall and the frontier barrier where the Allied soldiers guarded), of course, include Potsdamer Platz. However, as Berlin was admittedly overbuilt in the 1990s with the hopes of relocation of mass populations across from Germany, there was less need to keep building for periods of time (and there may be other reasons, too).  

 

Today, you still come across areas in these wastelands that now make ways for new office blocks and luxury apartments, 24 years after the Wall has come down. 

 

...and little did I know that my daily cycling commute, through Heinrich-Heine-Strasse towards Moritzplatz went through a border crossing, here, demarcated by one of many information boards around the city.

Many people allegedly attempted to cross the border here in vehicles, speeding through border police and the physical barriers - while, unfortunately, many of these attempts ended in misery. Today, Moritzplatz, at the heart of Kreuzberg, is relevant in two interesting ways (if not more):
It is an area where land prices skyrocketed more than anywhere else and it houses a refugee/asylum camp of Nigerians (and other Africans) on the park at the square where some of Germany's Occupy movement resided a few years ago.

waving the black flag

Through the timber window frames and the countless books on the oak-tree shelves of the library, I could see Fortnum & Mason. Two days ago members of an anarchist initiative occupied the building during the marches against spending cuts and I was standing in front of the very windows that I now looked through. Back home, long time ago, old friend S. had been a member of an anarchist-communist initiative. He wrote for the short-lived Mülksüzler (carefully chosen name, with a slight inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed), and to Kara Kızıl Notlar (Turkey's admittedly first theory-based anarchist journal). He co-ordinated a group of us translate parts of a manifesto. These had followed our days of occupation and boycott of the university's privately-run cafeteria in their very naive but sincere and well-organised attempts to get the lunch meal prices down. Long gone were the days of action and quasi-autonomus movements now... But two days ago I wondered if I would run into S. during the marches as I now remembered him for a moment whilst gazing out onto Piccadilly.

...

We had just attended a session titled Preservation / Destruction as part of the Royal Academy: Future Forum series, held at the Geological Society. Ippolito Pestellini and James Westcott of OMA discussed the provocations and implications of preservation, exploring how “our obsession with heritage is creating an artificial re-engineered version of our memory…” The presentation was an extension of their project titled Cronocaos which was exhibited at the 2010 Venice Biennale. It was in a way, as they described it, an explanation of what they exhibited at the Biennale, which was not fully understood by the audience. The idea of Cronocaos was initially to focus on 26 projects that have not been presented before as a body of work concerned with time and history. However, there was also a secondary meaning attached to it, as described in their words: "2010 is the perfect intersection of two tendencies that will have so-far untheorised implications for architecture: the ambition of the global taskforce of ‘preservation’ to rescue larger and larger territories of the planet, and the – corresponding? – global rage to eliminate the evidence of the postwar period of architecture as a social project".

As OMA claim, "while 12% of the world's surface is listed as heritage site (only a small proportion, 1.8% being built-up environment, whereas the rest include natural environments); there is an ongoing destruction of some other sort of heritage that is mainly driven by certain ideologies". This destruction was mainly carried out on postwar socialist architecture, the likes of which include many housing estates, including Robin Hood Gardens or Woodberry Down Estate in London (LSE Cities recently held an informal screening event for a documentary film titled Utopia London that also touches on this issue). Such examples are abundant throughout Europe, not limited only to the discourse of postwar socialism, but to a wider range of issues to do with the language of modernist architecture, be that a building for residents or for cultural or political enterprises . In Istanbul, the debate around demolition of Ataturk Kultur Merkezi and Istanbul Manifaturacilar Carsisi, prime examples of modernist architecture, can be recognised as part of this phenomenon, especially at a time, when an entire neighbourhood occupied by Roma people, next to the Theodisian Walls, was razed to pave way to construction of neo-Ottomanesque rows of villas, a government-led action that was a product of a semi-romantic ideology that rejects any heritage it the style of internationalist movements. OMA describes this phenomenon in the following terms: "There is now a global consensus that postwar architecture – and the optimism it embodied about architecture’s ability to organise the social world – was an aesthetic and ideological debacle". Although the aesthetics of this debate does play a crucial role, as much as the long-term incapability in supplying the necessary social infrastructure for its users, further crippled by the policies that followed after the periods of modernist movements in architecture; this is far from a unique occurrence in the history of built environment. OMA also touches upon that: "Our resignation is expressed in the flamboyant architecture of the market economy, which has its own built-in commercial expiration date". Expiration date does in deed matter, and there seems to be a random function has determined the extension of expiration dates of certain architectural heritage.

After all, there is significance in what we decide not to preserve (hence destruct, or allow for decay and destruct), and what we decide to. The presentation touched upon this through quite various and clever examples (including that of a project held in Venice and a house that was listed within the month it was constructed). The underlying message was that it is difficult to play with and evolve a preserved, or rather, a listed building or a site. Of course they did not fall short of establishing the fact that "preservation" was introduced within the Western culture and has primarily been a preoccupation of this very culture. Introduction of their "Project Japan" tried to support this theory albeit failing to do to appreciate the complexity of the diverse anthropological meanings of the term "preservation" in different contexts. "Mass preservation" may only be a relatively recent Western construct (which helps boost tourism revenues for countries with listed sites, and establishes for them an additional cultural benefit), one can actually go as far back as the ancient civilizations to trace the origins of this idea of "designing buildings that would be listed even before they are built". After all, the notion of "building to last forever" was arguably an ancient, and one that was always embedded in part of the Western understanding.

On the other hand, much was not discussed in this forum about the very different understanding of aesthetics and progression in the Eastern cultures. Japanese do "preserve" some of the ancient traditions, as was rightly noted, and in deed sometimes destruct and re-construct them. This was displayed with an example of a temple that was re-built 14 times. But the Japanese have also embedded a unique form of modernity through constant progress that frequently means demolition of the idle in masses, without necessarily re-constructing the same form (I am trying not to go into the unavoidable forms of total erasure through natural disasters such as earthquakes, here). A history of Meiji restoration, which went chronologically and culturally parallel to the late Ottoman and the subsequent early Turkish modernisation, helps us understand the nuance in the approach to "preservation". But of course, the time and the scope of the session would not suffice to go into these debate. Although they may not have had the time for it during the presentation, Ippolito Pestellini did actually appreciate a comment from the audience during the Q&A session, that suggested that the current "stasis" in Europe's cultural and political dominance, as well as the decline in its rate of progress could help us understand the roots of the establishment of these heritage codes that were being criticised. One may argue that the recent notion of heritage management is an attempt to re-establish the cultural superiority of the Western ideals in a frontier in which the post-colonial discourse still seems to hold relevance.

In their final analysis, OMA's presentation did also hint to a clever provocation of re-thinking "preservation", and with it, the notion of "destruction", for which they had adopted the Unesco's Heritage document and re-written an "agenda for progressive destruction". The floor was then given to three respondents, followed by a very well chaired panel discussion and Q&A by Christopher Woodward.

The first respondent, Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage, started his response by stressing that listing buildings and sites for heritage are not acts of "preservation", but of "conservation". He defined preservation as "an attempt to keep the qualities of a building in its original form" almost in a stage of stasis whereas conservation meant "protecting a building by improving its conditions, and managing its already available resources while keeping loyal to its original qualities". Making the obvious comparison between the passive and active qualities of the two actions, well known by architects and planners, he claimed that English Heritage sought to conserve buildings that were significant to the built-up environment of English architecture. That said, with a hint of criticism of OMA's presentation, Thurley did go on to approve of their idea that a fetishist approach to listing heritage sites created problems for progress in the business of conservation. However, he also claimed that, according to the studies they carried out, the public in England felt that more buildings than currently listed should be included as part of the English Heritage. Of course, conservation is not a very cheap business and much of the debate around what should and should not be conserved revolves around the issues of values and revenues protected and created by the act of conservation. It was interesting within this context, that a question from the floor by a gentleman at the Q&A session, who had worked long ago at the respective offices of local communities, regarding whether any calculations were made by English Heritage to estimate a threshold (relating to a monetary value of costs to keep maintain the building and run its conservation management) beyond which the costs of conservation would be regarded too high to decide to going ahead conserving the building would not be viable. His experience, as he has shared it, was that decisions on preservation were taken somewhat randomly and these were mainly either a "yes" or a "no" decisions, without much thinking done into the long-term future of the conservation project. He did not observe any such calculations to be made whilst these decisions were taken. The audience was unfortunately not given a very clear answer by Thurley on this question neither.

...

Following the end of the forum, we moved to library of the Geological Society where people had gathered for drinks. We went on debating the different values of conservation, the obvious social and political implications of preservation/destruction on not only the buildings themselves but also the people who use, live, love, and care about these buildings. We also tried to generate hypothetical urban planning scenarios that dealt with densification, which is a major part of K.'s research. It was then that I realised that the ethical, the cultural, the historical and the aesthetic rationales of conservation seemed to matter less for me than the pure economic benefits of a carefully constructed scenario of non-conservation (destruction, or replacement) that could ensure both short-term and long-term revenues. I did find it myself difficult to construct such strong scenarios, but I was nevertheless surprised to find myself less interested in the conservation of the ornamental ironwork of Fortnum and Mason and the significant history laid in the architecture of the building it occupied. A few years back, I would be fetishisising the knowledge of which architectural era and type I was observing during my history courses in university. Although still far from being anarchistic, I felt this new approach was still a much more progressive line of thought. It could easily lead me to come up wia brutally authoritarian and aesthetically mundane scenario or to a well market-oriented neo-liberal solution were the Fortnum and Mason building to be "destroyed" in this hypothetical scenario.

I then had a final long gaze at the building across the road, behind the timber frames. K. made a quick move to fixed her hair with a not-much-needed attempt to "preserve" its shape. I watched the windows of Fortnum and Mason reflect the traffic signals and cab headlights in absolute calm. A small merry go round was revolving in the underexposed background where the fluorescent blurred onto its shiny surface.

Dinner table lay-out

This is not about the lay-out or design of a dinner table. This is about some dinner, and some lay-out or form of some streets in London, or in my thoughts.

A.k. does not eat meat. Whether out of politeness or sincere appreciation of the smell, he seemed to have been impressed by the lamb. R.s. did make all the food as well as preparing the dinner table. S. had a long trip earlier and seemed to be quite tired. She was on her usual go during the dinner conversation, though. We were to discuss possible collaboration opportunities between our 'centre' and an institute at the NYU that earned a new grant. Everyone was going to bring in ideas about their current occupation and where they see themselves in a few years time and how this could all contribute to a potential work that would come out from the collective work (or a merger of their individual works) of the people.

I knew I did not have much to say when it would be my turn. I did learn a lot of what others were doing, though, as well as getting more detailed information on what my colleagues have been working on. At some instances, I was working hard on grabbing a fruit out of my fruit salad with my spoon without making too much noise not to interrupt anyone. I only had to deal with what was on my plate, the wine was being poured down somehow.

At one point I was looking at the shape of a piece of lamb meat and thinking of continuity and randomness in shape and form of things. If they had asked me at that moment of what I was thinking I could have easily come up with the following, which I developed on my way back home after the dinner:

"I am thinking of the about how the mystery behind street lay-outs of this city differs for me than those of in Istanbul. As I walk even around in the avenues which I walked before in London, I always see streets that I have never walked into. They may be completely new, or I may have seen them before. However, I've never discovered them. I now understand why: In Istanbul, I would walk into almost any street I pass by. The reason is that there is a bigger curiosity in every street. Because I can never see the 'end' of the street, regardless of how you define an 'end'. For me, it means where my point of view, that is aligned with the road on the street, whether be it paved or unpaved, a dirt road or an asphalt-road, gets interrupted. There may be a building that intervenes into my vista, or the street may be turning to right or left, or there may be a hill going up or down, so my view would always be cut before I reach my natural limit of my sight. Then, because of that curiosity, I would go in and discover that street. This is due to the topographical diversity of Istanbul as well as its historical and architectural heritage.

In London, it is not the same, thanks to the fact that many of the streets are created in a grid-pattern where you can see how the street stretches to the extent of your sight. It just goes straight ahead, except for the minority of the streets in the historical parts of the city shaped by Roman architecture and city-planning. The rest is just flat. Added to it is the usual gray and misty weather so your vista is even more limited and you already know what the rest of the street is like. Therefore you don't walk into it. But at that moment, another curiosity kicks in. In fact, there is a funny dilemma, or a dichotomy. The sheer fact that the streets in Istanbul are more crooked and interesting make the city overall a more mysterious place, but because I have discovered much of that mystery, there is few left for me. However, in London, because I don't tend to go into every street because of their similar patterns, there remains a greater amount of mystery for me. And at that point, I start to go into smaller-scale details that I might have not done otherwise:

I look at the differences of elements and how they are aligned in different streets. The size of a park and whether it is on the right or the left hand-side, and how many residential places it would correspond proportionally to its size in the street it is located. What are the proportions of social-housing to a detached housing in this street? Where do the older type of terraced or detached housing stop and social housing begin on the same street? And even if these are streets in the same neighbourhood with similar typologies, then I would start to zoom even more to start thinking about what sort of stories are taking place in the households on a particular street. To be fair, I would do the same in Istanbul, but not out of necessity, but out of already established curiosity. However, here in London, that curiosity could be my only tool of differentiating between different locations even within the same neighbourhood..."

Maybe, this could have been my answer, but my response was actually much shorter and straightforward:
"I have not really been focused on academic research for over a year now and I do not know where I see myself in 5 years". I did talk about recent interests in migration policies and socio-political implications of different spatial configuration of different migrant groups but that did not evolve into a discussion that other people brought up into the table. Well, I wasn't intending to lie or make up a story anyways.

My whole existence there, as well as what was going around was a big story in itself. I guess at this point, it may even be relevant to reveal that R and S are damn world-famous sociologists. And the dinner was delicious and wine was good.

And tonight she's my guide as I go on alone

With the music up above